Let's talk, CHOMP!

The Burger can in fact look as American as Old Glory and a good one is much more edible. Supposedly named for the town in New York State which is named after the city in Germany by some late 1800s yokel the burger is just ground beef between a sliced bun. It is widely accepted that it is usually served with lettuce tomato and onions with some mustard and ketchup; it's just a hot sandwich. The burger is now it's own enormous economy worth about $64,ooo,ooo,000 (that's billions, folks).
We have McDonalds, Burger King, Carl's jr., Jack in the Box, Wendy's, Hardy's, In-n'-Out Burger, Sonic and White Castle are just a few of the larger, well known companies that all have a respectable product which millions of people crave and consume on a daily basis.

Man, a burger can look good!

So as I guess the burger found it's self as the United States did after the Civil War and like America it didn't really become a super power until World War II; that's when the first McDonalds opened up in San Bernardino, CA. Now it wasn't until 1948 that the fast food concept hit and laid waste to the traditional method behind burger sales. Luckily the Burger didn't just go fast food on us; it remained a solid item on restaurants all around and pretty much every American cuisine serving place has their own variation of the sandwich. It gave us the privilege to enjoy a burger that was more hearty than the flimsy disk bagged up or tossed on a tray at the local BK lounge. With big burgers popular we not only got such triumphant creations as the Big Mac and the Whopper but we also got the gourmet burger!

Burgers done every which way one wanted, served with jack cheese, zucchini, avocado, dripping with pesto, crowned by bacon, done Hawaiian style, French style, Popeye style, smothered, with mushrooms, coated with blue cheese, pasted with teryaki, piled high with japenos, served on a silver plate with caviar, foie gras and made from Kobe beef, whatever your American heart desires! Whatever those clogged vanes need! You can burgers bigger than your head, bigger than your first born, bigger than the cow!


Listen I'm not here to start any fuss; I just want the burger to be embraced like the deity it is. I don't mean I want a burger made from Zues or Odin or the one god and I'm not going to create a shrine devoted to Hamburgers but in the country religious symbolism is everything you want it to be; it is all part of our narrative and mythology.

You can find your way across this country using burger joint the way a navigatior uses stars....We have munched Bridge burgers in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and Cable burgers hard by the Golden Gate, Dixie burgers in the sunny South and Yankee Doodle burgers in the North....We had a Capitol Burger -- guess where. And so help us, in the inner courtyard of the Pentagon, a Penta burger.

Charles Kuralt, journalist

A Hamburger is warm and fragrant and juicy. A hamburger is soft and nonthreatening. It personifies the Great Mother herself who has nourished us from the beginning. A hamburger is an icon of layered circles, the circle being at once the most spiritual and the most sensual of shapes. A hamburger is companionable and faintly erotic. The nipple of the Goddess, the bountiful belly-ball of Eve. You are what you think you eat.

Tom Robbins

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

Mark Twain

Special thanks to Mary's Danish for the album cover made back in the early 90s when irony still meant something.