{"id":118934,"date":"2018-02-12T11:00:50","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T16:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118934"},"modified":"2018-02-14T10:59:46","modified_gmt":"2018-02-14T15:59:46","slug":"burger-an-american-lyric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/12\/burger-an-american-lyric\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hamburger: An American Lyric"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Campaigning for president in 1992, William Jefferson Clinton proved himself to be the citizen\u2019s candidate by his penchant for hamburgers. Burgher<\/em>: citizen of the city. There he would be, according to the press, stopping in for hamburgers at local diners. Bill Clinton, not just the citizen\u2019s candidate, he was the citizen <\/em>candidate; he liked the average Joe\u2019s kind of food (not the sloppy joe; though they use a burger bun, they are not burgers). \u201cIt\u2019s the economy, stupid,\u201d was the mantra of the Clinton campaign. The burger is the citizen\u2019s economic food choice, the Everyman\u2019s lowest common denominator.<\/p>\n

His opponent, President George H. W. Bush, on the other hand, scion of a prominent New England family with a banker father who became a senator, had been cast as out of touch with the average citizen of the United States. \u201cPoor George,\u201d the future Texas governor Ann Richards famously said in 1988, \u201che was born with a silver foot in his mouth.\u201d Not Bill Clinton: from the media reports, one got a sense he had been born with a hamburger in his mouth. And not a hamburger like President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s favorite hamburger in the\u00a0midsixties, made from thirty-five-dollar-per-pound ground-up aged sirloin. (Factoring in inflation that would be about $280 in 2017.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

During Clinton\u2019s campaign for the presidency in 1992 and his early years in office, the hamburger was riding high, with estimates that \u201c86.6 percent of all Americans order[ed] some type of hamburger sandwich at least once in 1994.\u201d\u00a0But the times, they were a-changing. In 1993, the Boca Burger appeared, a veggie burger made from soy protein and wheat gluten. The hamburger-eating presidential candidate began to change his choice of burgers in his early years in the White House, when he began scarfing down Boca Burgers\u2014huge quantities of which were being ordered by First Lady Hillary Clinton. (In six weeks in 1994, four thousand\u00a0Boca Burgers were purchased by the White House.) Some anxiety from animal-flesh producers greeted the news of the Boca Burger\u2019s popularity at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A spokesperson for the American Meat Institute (AMI) stated, \u201cNothing will replace the American hamburger. The AMI is confident that President Clinton is still eating plenty of real hamburger, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time First Lady Hillary Clinton became presidential-candidate Clinton, Bill proved the AMI wrong. He followed a predominantly vegan diet.<\/p>\n

The hamburger, as both idea and food item, is tightly coiled within the experience of being citizens of the United States. It is seen as a democratic, inclusive food. Elisabeth Rozin invokes the pattern and rhythm of Emma Lazarus\u2019s poem on the Statue of Liberty, \u201cGive me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.\u201d Rozin sings the praises not of freedom but of \u201cfinely particulate meat, ground or shredded or minced or chopped.\u201d It is easy to prepare, she says, but equally important, \u201cit offers the full nutritional and sensory experiences of meat to everyone\u2014the young, the old, the toothless, and the tired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Citizen Burger Bar in North Carolina proclaims, \u201cA\u00a0delicious\u00a0burger is your right.\u201d Following \u00a0the trope, they identify the burger and beer as \u201cessential liberties.\u201d Ray Kroc in the film\u00a0The Founder <\/em>gives a pep talk to the McDonald brothers\u2014whom he will soon be undercutting\u2014by echoing nationalist themes. He exhorts them, \u201cFranchise the damn thing,\u201d adding, \u201cfrom sea to shining sea.\u201d He declares, \u201cDo it for your country. Do it for America.\u201d He promises soon the golden arches will become just as, if not more, important than the cross on the church and the flag on the courthouse; McDonald\u2019s must aspire to be \u201cthe place where Americans come together to break bread.\u201d Why, \u201cMcDonald\u2019s could be the new American church.\u201d<\/p>\n

Crosses. Flags. Arches. John Lee Hancock\u2019s movie represents Kroc\u2019s view that the franchising of McDonald\u2019s is a story of civic accomplishment: the hamburger, the cheap food that everyone could eat. It fit the hand of a child; it could be held in the hand while driving; truly, you did not need teeth to eat many versions. (\u201cThere is nothing at McDonald\u2019s that makes it necessary to have teeth,\u201d the novelist and social critic Vance Bourjaily opined in the 1970s.)<\/p>\n

The hamburger owes its existence to the United States, in part because the United States was the animal-flesh-eating democracy of the nineteenth century. Per capita consumption of animal flesh far outpaced the European places most immigrants hailed from. The\u00a0 development of the hamburger in the twentieth century consolidated the association between democratic rights and animal-flesh eating. Six years before a McDonald\u2019s opened in East Berlin, in 1982, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) created a McDonald\u2019s-like fast-food burger place called the Grilletta. Before the Berlin Wall crumbled, the Soviet-run GDR desired to demonstrate its \u201cwith-it-ness\u201d with a burger joint\u2014offering, of course, a better burger than any in the West. They wanted to out West the West.<\/p>\n

I am not going to review all the ideas about the history of the hamburger. I will not wonder whether the rampaging Tartars eating their ground horsemeat created the hamburger\u2019s precursor. I won\u2019t speculate on whether European immigrants whose point of\u00a0demarcation was Hamburg salted their animal flesh to keep it fresh and arrived at the United States having innovated the \u201chamburger.\u201d Or was it the sailors from Hamburg? Did Delmonico\u2019s serve a Hamburg steak in 1834? Much ink is spilled on these issues and many others, drawing on legends, vague historical facts, fakelore masquerading as folklore, secondary but not primary sources, word of mouth, and assertions by various cities and counties of their role in the history of the hamburger. Here a Hamburg steak (or Salisbury steak) evolves into hamburger, there an immigrant or sailor brings the hamburger along with their baggage, and dotted throughout the United States, we can find the very birthplace of the hamburger itself.<\/p>\n

Forget about the Tartars and Hamburg steak and Salisbury steak and sausage and meat loaf and meatball and the ancient Chinese text with a recipe for a hamburger-like food; the hamburger\u2019s origin story must plainly be from here<\/em>, not over there, <\/em>before we export it over there.<\/p>\n

The Americanness of the hamburger\u2014Bobby \u00a0Flay\u2019s \u201cperfect sandwich,\u201d no \u201cthe perfect meal\u201d\u2014arises from the Western expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century. This is when economic, geographic, and industrial factors combined to favor cow flesh over pig flesh, and to deliver this cow flesh to growing markets. Eating its sizzling, fatty bulk between buns fulfills the iconic role of the U.S. consumer. As countless historians have shown, consumption itself is an aspect of the narrative of twentieth-century United States.<\/p>\n

Being the citizen\u2019s food, the hamburger is celebrated by the citizen\u2014in the form of food critics and culinary historians\u2014with a \u201cgee-whiz\u201d tone. They find in its story a story of progress itself. Hamburger-eating historians of the burger see inevitability in the statistics that show the global reach of the hamburger. They gobble down its status, forwarding their own favorites, and so offering one further salute to the triumphalist rhetoric of the hamburger through personal testimony. They join the stories told by those who prevailed: Ray Kroc (McDonald\u2019s) in his 1977 autobiography, Billy Ingram (White Castle) in a talk in 1964, Jim McLamore (Burger King) in a posthumously published autobiography. With red-blooded tropes, the arc is upward, a teleological logic to the prevailing of the hamburger. Telling the history chronologically becomes a form of obeisance to the success of mass production. For them, the hamburger\u2019s history is juicy, not problematic.<\/p>\n

The narrative that grants inevitability to the success of the hamburger is confirmed by the hamburger consumers themselves in their purchases. But let\u2019s pause and recognize that, as the Diner\u2019s Dictionary <\/em>succinctly states, \u201cthe \u00a0concept \u00a0of \u00a0a \u00a0small \u00a0cake \u00a0of \u00a0minced beef, grilled or fried, is an ancient one,\u201d and the designation \u201chamburger\u201d is a new name for an old food. Before there were hamburgers, there were individual-portion-sized cutlets. The Oxford Companion to Food <\/em>identifies the chop\u2014\u201cslices of meat in the size of individual portions\u201d\u2014as a forerunner of hamburger. Like beta versus VHS (predigital technology, if you are wondering), there were different hamburgers, for instance White Castle\u2019s square versus the traditional circle. But these iterations involved the reshaping of animal flesh to a more universal and consistent size with interchangeable parts. It is as American, and industrialized, as Henry Ford\u2019s assembly-line production model.<\/p>\n

With our palates influenced by nostalgia, we experiment with our burgers, but often within limit. There remains something that cannot <\/em>be a burger, depending on who is deciding: hamburger from cows or not, from animal flesh or not, with condiments or not, bun or not.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of a very long evening in which Harold and Kumar overcome a variety of obstacles in their pursuit of a White Castle hamburger, Kumar makes a speech about the meaning of immigration to the United States. In his telling, hamburgers form the heart of being a citizen of the United States.<\/p>\n

So you think this is just about the burgers, huh? Let me tell you, it\u2019s about far more than that. Our parents came to this country, escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger. Hunger, Harold. They were very, very hungry. They wanted to live in a land that treated them as equals, a land filled with hamburger stands. And not just one type of hamburger, okay? Hundreds of types with different sizes, toppings, and condiments. That land was America. America, Harold! America! Now, this is about achieving what our parents set out for. This is about the pursuit of happiness. This night \u2026 is about the American dream.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inspired, they take a leap that brings them to the White Castle, and we soon see them at a table filled with those famous sliders. The symbolism of the hamburger may seem fixed (equal to the entire United States), yet Kumar did not consume White Castle hamburgers in the movie scenes. The actor who plays Kumar, Kal Penn (Kalpen Suresh Modi), is a vegetarian and ate veggie burgers. Ten years before White Castle introduced a vegetarian slider to its customers, they custom-made veggie sliders for Penn to consume as Kumar.<\/p>\n

If Harold and Kumar traversed the United States in the 1970s with Charles Kuralt, they would have passed by (or passed up) bridge burgers, Cable burgers, Dixie burgers, Yankee Doodle burgers, Capital burgers, Penta burgers (inside the Pentagon). Or they might have chosen (or rejected): \u201cgrabba burgers, kinga burgers, lotta burgers, castle burgers, country burgers, bronco burgers, Broadway burgers, broiled burgers, beefnut burgers, bell burgers, plush burgers, prime burgers, flame burgers \u2026 dude burgers, char burgers, tall boy burgers, golden burgers, 747 jet burgers, whiz burgers, nifty burgers, and thing burgers.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can butter your burger and serve it on cornbread, or with peanut butter and bacon. Thanks to\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Paris Review, <\/em>you can make Ernest Hemingway\u2019s hamburger recipe<\/a> (with garlic, capers, scallions, seasonings, and egg as binder). You can get your burger with Fritos (in Texas, of course), or a hard-boiled egg.<\/p>\n

The names and varieties suggest that hamburgers are pluralistic like the United States itself. It\u2019s working-class food elevated, served in places called Castles and Royal and King. In movies, really bad guys eat hamburgers (Pulp Fiction<\/em>) and really good guys eat hamburgers (American Graffiti<\/em>). But it turns out the whiteness of the characters of American Graffiti <\/em>mirrored the whiteness of the servers at the diner. The original Mel\u2019s Diner used in American Graffiti<\/em>, set in 1962, did not let blacks work at the counter in the early 1960s. (Oh, sixties California nostalgia, how you do disappoint.)<\/p>\n

The year 1962 was notable for another burger: Claes Oldenburg\u2019s Giant Hamburger. <\/em>It was not made from animal flesh but from canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes. The sculpture was sewn together by the master seamstress Patty Mucha\u2014Patty<\/em>, reminding us of a burger\u2019s definition: it is a patty, usually circular in shape.<\/p>\n

Oldenburg believed art should relate to everyday life, its realities, its objects. Hard objects he made soft. Large objects he made small. And small objects, like the burger, he made large. On January 27, 1967, the Art Gallery of Ontario purchased the Floor Burger <\/em>(n\u00e9e Giant Hamburger<\/em>) for two thousand dollars. Art students protested the purchase of Oldenburg\u2019s F<\/em>l<\/em>o<\/em>o<\/em>r<\/em> B<\/em>u<\/em>r<\/em>ger<\/em>, asking, \u201cWhat is art if this is art?\u201d \u201cWhat about a Heinz ketchup bottle?\u201d they challenged. They offered to donate a huge ketchup bottle to the art gallery\u2014still hewing to the hamburger narrative, as ketchup is the preferred condiment. Maybe they should have asked, \u201cWhat is a burger?\u201d<\/p>\n

Curators are found not only in art museums overseeing giant floor burgers; they can be found in restaurants where they are creating veggie burgers. \u201cSometimes you see veggie burgers made with a hundred\u00a0ingredients, a kitchen-sink burger,\u201d said Chloe Coscarelli, the chef and co-owner of Chloe\u2019s. \u201cIt\u2019s better when you curate a burger.\u201d\u00a0The Oxford Companion of Food <\/em>reminds us that \u201cconsumption of things like hamburger, that is, cooked round patties or rissoles of meat, dates back a very long way.\u201d Burger, cutlet, rissole: they are not only made of animal flesh. Is the haggis waiting offstage to be transformed into the veggie burger? (Just kidding.) Or is the falafel waiting simply a flattening into a patty? (More seriously.)<\/p>\n

Like the fraught concept of \u201ccitizen\u201d itself, the burger is not one thing. Popeye subverted the idea of the hamburger in 1929 when spinach gave him (and anyone else who ate it) strength and the hamburger eater was the wimpy one. The Popeye cartoons were so popular during the Depression, sales of spinach in America increased by 33 percent. Now there are spinach burgers with or without hamburger.<\/p>\n

The hamburger, long the all-American meal, has always contained an element of instability to it, not only because it can rot. From references in popular culture to investors like Bill Gates seeking to find the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger\u2019s identity is as malleable as that patty of protein itself before it is thrown on a grill. Perhaps both the burger and the citizens it feeds are changing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Carol J. Adams is the author of numerous books, including <\/em>The Sexual Politics of Meat. She is the co-editor of several anthologies, including, most\u00a0recently,<\/em>\u00a0Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (co-edited with Lori Gruen)<\/em> and<\/em> The Carol J. Adams Reader (2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from\u00a0<\/span><\/em>Burger<\/span><\/a><\/span>, part of Bloomsbury\u2019s\u00a0Object Lessons<\/span><\/a>\u00a0series.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Campaigning for president in 1992, William Jefferson Clinton proved himself to be the citizen\u2019s candidate by his penchant for hamburgers. Burgher: citizen of the city. There he would be, according to the press, stopping in for hamburgers at local diners. Bill Clinton, not just the citizen\u2019s candidate, he was the citizen candidate; he liked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1329,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[20331,32008,31998,31997,6397,5654,11441,32003,14896,32012,31996,1010,32002,31999,10567,1220,15955,32009,11855,32006,7465,32005,4912,5658,8670,32010,32004,32011,2831,32000,32001,7290,32007],"class_list":["post-118934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-american-dream","tag-american-graffiti","tag-american-meat-institute","tag-ann-richards","tag-berlin","tag-bill-clinton","tag-bill-gates","tag-bobby-flay","tag-burgers","tag-carol-j-adams","tag-cheeseburgers","tag-claes-oldenburg","tag-delmonicos","tag-elizabeth-rozin","tag-emma-lazarus","tag-george-h-w-bush","tag-german-democratic-republic","tag-giant-hamburger","tag-hamburgers","tag-harold-and-kumar","tag-heinz","tag-henry-ford","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-mcdonalds","tag-object-lessons","tag-oxford-campanion-of-food","tag-oxford-companion-to-food","tag-popeye","tag-pulp-fiction","tag-ray-kroc","tag-salisbury-steak","tag-vhs","tag-white-castle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hamburger: An American Lyric<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Forget about Hamburg and the ancient Chinese text with a hamburger-like recipe; the hamburger\u2019s origin story must plainly be from America.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/12\/burger-an-american-lyric\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hamburger: An American Lyric by Carol J. 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