Food History

FOOD HISTORY anatomy of the Burger

The hamburger is one of the world’s most popular foods, with nearly 50 billion served up annually across the globe. Although the humble beefpatty-on-a-bun is technically not much more than 100 years old, it's part of a far greater lineage, linking businessmen, World War II soldiers, political refugees, medieval traders and Neolithic farmers. The groundwork for the ground-beef sandwich was laid with the domestication of cattle

(in Mesopotamia around 10,000 years ago), and with the growth of Hamburg, Germany, as an independent trading city in the 12th century, where beef delicacies were popular.

Jumping ahead to 1848, when political revolutions took place, Hamburg which was known as an exporter of high-quality beef, began restaurants offering a “Hamburg-style” chopped steak. The hamburger seems to have made its jump from plate to bun in the last decades of the 19th century, though the site of this transformation is highly contested. Lunch wagons, fair stands and roadside restaurants have all been put forward as possible sites of the hamburger’s birth. Whatever its genesis, the burger-on-a-bun found its first wide audience at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

Two years later, though, disaster struck in the form of a detailed unsavory side of the meatpacking industry. Industrial ground beef was easy to adulterate with fillers, preservatives and meat scraps, and the hamburger became a prime suspect.

Soon the inspiration for national hamburger chains began to boom in the years after World War II: McDonald’s and In-N-Out Burger (both founded in 1948), Burger King (1954) and Wendy’s (1969).

Led by McDonald’s the hamburger franchised fast food—soon spread like wildfire globally.