The Ancient Origins of Fast Food

White Castle, 1921. McDonald’s, 1948. We are fairly sure America invented eating standing up at a counter, in a hurry, out of paper. Pompeii had 158 of them.

A painting of a Roman street: a queue of people holding bowls at a counter where cooks stir cauldrons over an open fire. — The queue is the oldest part of the whole business.

White Castle opened in Wichita in 1921. The McDonald brothers rebuilt their kitchen around speed in 1948. Eating standing up, out of paper, in a hurry, feels like something America invented and sold to everybody else.

It is about two thousand years older. And the evidence is not a theory — it is a stone counter opening onto a street, with the jars still in it.

The Man With the Basket

A Greek terracotta figurine of a comic actor in a padded costume and mask. — A comic actor in costume. Aristophanes made a sausage-seller his hero, and the audience knew exactly how low that was.

The first fast-food seller we can actually see is Greek, and he is on a stage.

In 424 BC Aristophanes put a sausage-seller at the centre of Knights. He comes on carrying his stock in a basket, and he grew up scrounging scraps in the market. The whole joke of the play is that this man is so low, so completely unrespectable, that he is the only person in Athens coarse enough to out-argue a politician.

That contempt is the evidence. You do not build a comedy around a trade the audience has never met.

Rome Built the Counter

A marble-topped L-shaped Roman counter in a ruined shop, with five round jar openings sunk into it. — No door, no table, no waiting. The stone does the work.

A masonry Roman bar counter with sunken storage jars, open to a street in Pompeii. — No door, no table, no waiting. The stone does the work.

What Rome added was not the food. It was the furniture.

A Roman bar is a masonry counter opening straight onto the pavement, with big ceramic jars sunk into the top. No door to go through, nowhere to sit. You stand in the street and the food comes over the stone.

Steven Ellis counted 158 of them at Pompeii — in a town of perhaps twelve thousand people. Thirteen per cent have no cooking facilities anywhere near them. They are not kitchens at all. They are handover points.

That is the real invention: a shopfront designed for people who are not going to sit down.

What Was on Offer

The interior of a Roman bar at Ostia, with a marble counter, stepped shelves and a washing basin. — The bar on the Via di Diana at Ostia, shelves and washing basins still standing — and the food painted on its wall: olives, a turnip, eggs in a glass. Photos Marie-Lan Nguyen and MumblerJamie.

A Roman wall painting of foodstuffs above a row of shelves in a bar at Ostia. — The bar on the Via di Diana at Ostia, shelves and washing basins still standing — and the food painted on its wall: olives, a turnip, eggs in a glass. Photos Marie-Lan Nguyen and MumblerJamie.

In 2020 Pompeii finished excavating one of these counters, and it is the best evidence we have.

The front is painted — a sea-nymph on a seahorse, a rooster, two mallard ducks hanging by their feet. An advertisement, in colour, at eye level.

In the jars: duck, goat, pig, fish and land snails. In one wine container, crushed fava beans at the bottom — a trick recorded in Apicius for lightening the colour of cheap wine.

One thing those jars were not doing is keeping food hot. They are unglazed and porous, sunk in cold stone with nothing burning underneath. The cooking happened on a hearth out the back, as it has in every takeaway since. The jars were the larder.

And It Came Wrapped

A hand-coloured photographic slide of a ruined Roman bakery with millstones and an arched oven. — A Pompeii bakery, hand-coloured on glass for a Victorian lantern show. The stones ground it, the arch baked it.

An 1832 engraving of a round Roman loaf scored into eight wedges. — Left: the loaf as a British engraver drew it in 1832, wedges and all. Right: bread and figs on a wall at Herculaneum — lunch, painted by someone who ate it.

A Roman wall painting of a round loaf of bread and two figs. — Left: the loaf as a British engraver drew it in 1832, wedges and all. Right: bread and figs on a wall at Herculaneum — lunch, painted by someone who ate it.

There is a loaf from Herculaneum, carbonised by the eruption and now in a museum in Naples. It is scored into eight wedges to be pulled apart by hand, with a groove worn round its middle where a string was tied to carry it.

Portioned, and handled for transport. Packaging.

It is also stamped with the baker’s name: Of Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus. Celer turns up later on a list of freed men. The baker got out.

You Could Hear It Coming

An 1882 colour lithograph of Roman wall paintings showing customers being served drinks in a tavern. — Painted on a bar wall at Pompeii, copied in colour in 1882. They drink, they dice, they argue, and the landlord throws them out — with the dialogue written in beside them.

An 1882 colour lithograph of Roman wall paintings showing two men playing dice and then being thrown out of a bar. — Painted on a bar wall at Pompeii, copied in colour in 1882. They drink, they dice, they argue, and the landlord throws them out — with the dialogue written in beside them.

Seneca, in the AD 60s, is trying to work in rooms above a bath house and losing. He writes a letter listing every noise he can hear. Among them: the sausage-man, the pastry-man, and all the cookshop hawkers selling their wares, each to his own particular tune.

Every vendor with his own jingle. That is not a literary flourish. It is a complaint, written by a man who could not concentrate.

Five Emperors Tried to Stop It

A brightly painted Roman wall shrine above a marble counter, showing figures flanked by serpents. — Even the takeaway had gods. The emperors were less keen.

Tiberius had the aediles restrict cookshops, pastries included. Caligula abolished them and banned the sale of boiled meat and hot water. Claudius kept the ban. Nero allowed cooked food in the popinae only if it was pulses or vegetables. Vespasian cut it to vegetables alone.

Five emperors in sixty years, legislating against hot food to go.

The reason was never the food. A counter on a street corner is where people gather and talk with nobody keeping a record of it. Suetonius lists Nero’s ban among his good deeds.

One Last Thing: They Never Called It That

The word everybody uses for these places is thermopolium. It appears three times in all of surviving Latin, all of them in Plautus, and never describes a building. Archaeologists have attached it to around 109 properties at Pompeii.

The Romans called them popinae, cauponae, tabernae. Shops.

So What Did America Add?

Not the counter. Not the speed, the standing, the wrapper, or eating with your hands in the street.

What America added was sameness. Each of those 158 Pompeian bars was somebody’s own shop, with its own cook and its own painted front. No two alike, and nobody wanted them to be. The invention was not fast food. It was the idea that it should taste the same in a thousand places at once.

Rome would have found that very strange. The whole point was that the place on the next corner was different.

Fun Fact

Painted on that 2020 counter is a dog on a lead. Scratched into the frame beside it, somebody left a few words about the man who ran the place, which the excavators render politely as "Nicias, shameless defecator." A joke about a takeaway, written on the wall of the takeaway, that outlasted the city. The oldest bad review we have.

Sources

Aristophanes, Knights (424 BC) — the sausage-seller, his basket and his upbringing in the market.

John Wilkins, The Boastful Chef: The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy (Oxford University Press, 2000) — food-sellers and cookshops in Greek comedy.

Steven J. R. Ellis, "The distribution of bars at Pompeii: archaeological, spatial and viewshed analyses," Journal of Roman Archaeology 17 (2004), 371–384 — the count of 158 counters and the proportion with no cooking facilities.

Steven J. R. Ellis, "The use and misuse of ‘legacy data’ in identifying a typology of retail outlets at Pompeii," Internet Archaeology 24 (2008) — thermopolium in the surviving Latin corpus.

Steven J. R. Ellis, The Roman Retail Revolution: The Socio-Economic World of the Taberna (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Parco Archeologico di Pompei, press releases on the Regio V counter (December 2020 and August 2021) — the paintings, the food residues, the fava beans in the wine, and the graffito.

Seneca, Epistulae Morales 56.2 — the street cries of the sausage-man, the pastry-man and the cookshop hawkers.

Suetonius, Tiberius 34.1, Claudius 40.1, Nero 16.2; Cassius Dio 60.6.7 and 62.14.2 — the imperial restrictions on cookshops.

Penelope M. Allison, Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2004) — cooking equipment distributed through Pompeian houses.