“The Hamburger: A History” (Yale University Press) – By Josh Ozersky.
Writing an ode to a single foodstuff is a road studded with pitfalls. If you go too granular, your narrative is derailed by obscurity. If you’re too generalist, you sink into a morass of cliche.
Which is why, with the hamburger – and there is no more quintessentially American foodstuff – a deft hand is needed to straddle the narrative strands of cultural, culinary and business history and place it all into context. Josh Ozersky succeeds in “The Hamburger: A History,” effectively a book-length essay on small slabs of ground-up cow and the buns that love them.
Many culinary histories, particularly those that cast food as an indicator of culture, are overstuffed and meandering – full of information and detail but lacking a certain sharpness and substituting liberal doses of affection instead. Not so “The Hamburger.”
Ozersky tells a taut tale of the sandwich’s diaspora and hand-to-mouth existence, from the legendary beginnings to the pioneering ministrations of the early White Castle chain, from the founding McDonald brothers to franchising genius Ray Kroc and beyond, all the way to Morgan Spurlock, who made a documentary of his 30-day feeding frenzy on an all-McDonald’s diet.
He is pleasingly omnivorous in his sources, enlisting everything from architecture criticism to political analysis to the deconstruction of Hollywood movies (”American Graffiti” and its hamburger-culture scenery) as he examines hamburger culture and hamburger nostalgia. He makes a convincing case that the latter is, ultimately, a “lucrative lie.”
Photo: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS / Yale University Press.
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