Andrew F. Smith, Hamburger: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2008)After reading David Gentilcore's book on tomatoes, I went searching online for book reviews or related work. Various titles by Andrew Smith surfaced, and as this one was readily available at our public library, I read it next. Hamburger is a nice, short book with lots of pictures - including an idyllic frontispiece of a juicy burger on a red-checked tablecloth, the kind of picture that makes your tummy growl at 9 p.m.! I read the book in two sittings while not feeling well, which does credit to Smith's work.
Reading Hamburger sandwiched between Gentilcore's historically erudite Pomodoro! and Michael Pollan's vigorous In Defense of Food put the book up against some stiff competition, however. Although Hamburger begins with the history of hamburgers as a food item, the story was short and vague compared to Gentilcore's detailed exploration of nearly five centuries of tomatoes. And the ethical dimension was discussed so dispassionately that I couldn't tell whether Smith actually had an opinion about it.
I did learn that hamburgers as we know them (ground meat patty served in a bun) didn't appear on the American scene till the 1890s, as cheap food for factory-workers. Before that, there were sandwiches (~18th C), and hamburger steaks (~19th C), but they didn't go together. The necessary intermediate invention was the meat grinder. Thus, from its earliest days, hamburger was mystery meat.
This is a point to remember for the overall record, by the way: in the 1890s, cheap American street food is already garbage. Some folks who don't like McDonalds (founded fifty year later) and processed food seem to forget that, er, bit of history. So the first hamburger chain, White Castle Burgers (founded 1916, or 1921, depending where you look!), actually rescued hamburgers from their "bad reputation" by incorporating transparent, up-to-snuff meat practices into its marketing strategy. (Business savvy also included a biplane for efficient supervisory patrol of more than 100 locations. Some retro-burger joint should resurrect that feature!)
Perhaps inevitably, Hamburger is more about how the food was sold than about the food itself. A more accurate title for the book might have been Hamburger Vendors: A Global History. I enjoyed the first chapter on "The Hamburger Chain," which carried the story up to McDonalds. The first recognizable chain name was A&W, c. 1919. After the surprising role of the burger chain as saviour of the hamburger, the most interesting part of the history was the difference WWII made, not just by altering what burger joints could sell during the war, but also by functioning as a transition marker between the pre-war urban burger market and the post-war suburban demo & geographics. Most of the burger chains we recognize (eg. Burger King, Jack-in-the-Box, Wendy's) are post-WWII businesses, that began by catering to suburban families with cars. It was quite interesting to read about how expectations of dining ambiance fluctuated over time. I suppose I was too young to ever really grasp a drive-in (I learned about "carhops" from this book!). And now I realize that walk-up burger and ice cream shacks have a historic as well as an economic rationale.
But chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - largely focused on who sells what kind of burger where - were not so engrossing. For one thing, I get lost when books repeat the same chronological sequence over and over. For another, McDonald's raised so many issues by ch. 3 that the book lost its original coherence as a story about hamburgers. I dozed through the clones and the sides and the global spread...zzzz...and woke up with a snort when Smith asserted: "Considered exotic when they first appear [outside North America], American fast-food outlets soon come to symbolize safety, convenience, fun, familiarity, sanctuary, modernity and connectedness to the world." (p. 109) Uh...to whom??
I think I was waiting for Smith to take a stand about the bad side of burgers, and because he never did, the book ended up being bland for my taste. Now, I grant the neutral tone is probably appropriate to this general-audience history book. If I want pyrotechnics, I think I need to read Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001). But Hamburger does present itself as a history book, and as such it is disappointingly low on 'food for thought.'
