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So, here are the dark pasts lurking behind three of the nation's most popular fast food chains. It's disheartening how many of them got their start by stealing from other restaurants!

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McDonald's
The first McDonald's was opened way back in 1940 by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald. They immediately began working on ways to depersonalize the dining experience, including innovations like turning the heat off to force customers to leave faster. This caught the eye of sadist entrepreneur Ray Kroc, who pitched the McDonald brothers a glorious dream: franchises everywhere. Naturally, their reaction was an incredulous no. And they had a point. Who would actually want to eat at a place like that?

Still, Kroc pushed forward, eventually buying out the McDonalds for $2.7 million dollars. No doubt they laughed like Dr. Evil at the thought of the exorbitant sum they'd just swindled out of Kroc. Nowadays, of course, McDonald's merely has a gross annual product larger than the nation of Ecuador. How big are they? Forget burgers, they're actually the world's biggest toy distributor. (So that's what they make those McNuggets out of…) Sorry, Rick and Mo, looks like you blew it.

Taco Bell
Once upon a time there was an average “gringo” by the name of Glen Bell. As a youngster in the 1940s, Bell opened a couple hot dog stands in California. But while they did okay, the joint across the street was doing the really big business, with lines around the block. The restaurant: the Mitla Café. Their secret? Some exotic dish called a “taco.”

So what did Bell do? In the grand tradition of cultural appropriation, he insinuated himself into the lives of the Mitla Café owners, won over their trust, pried the secret of their delicious tacos from them, then set up his own competing taco stand and marketed it to the masses. So the next time someone scoffs that Taco Bell isn't really Mexican food, tell them they're right, it's not. But it is a real-life example of the American dream at work. Thanks, capitalism!

Burger King
If Burger King seems like a second rate McDonalds ripoff, it's because that's exactly what Burger King is. After taking a tour of the original McDonald's restaurant in 1953, Keith J. Kramer and Matthew Burns decided they could make food just as bad back in Florida, so they copied the McDonald's business plan and set about doing exactly that. Just one problem: the super special Insta-Broilers they installed in all their franchises broke down when exposed to burger juice. Whoops!

Enter James McLamore (no relation to the rapper) and David R. Edgerton, who cobbled together a new device they called a “flame broiler,” bought out the Burger King chain, and rebooted the whole thing. That was nice, but still not quite enough to topple McDonald's from the top spot. So in 1981, Burger King launched an all-out advertising offensive, claiming their burgers were slightly less crap than McDonald's burgers. The result? McDonald's sued Burger King and the BK spokesman—a four-year-old named Sarah Michelle Gellar. That's right, without the Burger Wars, we might never have had Buffy.

Finished!

Will you continue to eat at these fast food restaurants after learning about their secret histories, or do you think we should boycott them because of their questionable business practices?

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Article Source: Grunge