Hamburger by Josh Ozersky

Author:Josh Ozersky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2008-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

FOUR

Have It Your Way

The postwar decades were the high summer of the hamburger, the years when burgers attained the summit of symbolism. The hamburger attained the status of American icon: something so often pictured, and so universally understood, that it comes to be understood by nearly everybody—a fact not wasted on Pop Artists, cartoonists, or ad men. Hamburgers by the 1960s were firmly connected with youth culture, postwar abundance, and, eventually, big business. Thus, by the late 1960s, they had come to represent much of what people liked, or didn’t like, about America.

Because Ray Kroc was right. America was changing. The explosion of prosperity and modernity in the aftermath of World War II swept away much of America’s decay. Some was cultural, the detritus of Victorian culture still found growing in the corners and beneath the furniture. Isolationism, some notions about race and gender, overt anti-Semitism, the belief in small government—all were swept into the air, and some years passed before they fell back down in new patterns amid the stale air. But much of the decay was physical, in the form of rotting buildings and apartments, particularly in urban centers where the Depression had suppressed new construction for many years. Developers following the lead of New York’s William Levitt were discovering the attractive power of suburbs, new areas where postwar life could be writ in bright block letters on a blissfully blank slate. President Dwight Eisenhower, impressed by the efficiency of Germany’s Autobahn, saw to it that the Federal Highway Act of 1956 was passed. The great auto companies were equally energized by new roads, greater consumer spending, and the immense expansion of the nation’s infrastructure that the war had occasioned. There were more families with more people, living in new places and going to even newer ones. The hamburger, the most mobile, efficient, and satisfying sandwich ever devised, filled the vacuum at the center of all this energy expenditure. It was the perfect food to eat while driving, merrily dialing the steering wheel with one hand while holding the burger in the other, eyes firmly focused on the road to come. It was the perfect food for the atom-age family, each with its own separate sphere and interests but all united in unstated consensus; at a hamburger supper, each member of the family might eat his or her own identical meal, each with its own meat, its own starch, and its own customized condiments, all contained within easy reach of a single grasping hand. And with the enriched bun now accessible to everyone, thanks to the universal success of the hamburger, the very image of contained and mobile abundance was there for all to see.

Elisabeth Rozin, the burger’s most far-seeing eulogist, writes,

The smooth, dry, uncontaminated outer surface of the sandwich is the ideal vehicle for a handheld meal; grease, juice, stickiness, and strong food odors are kept where they belong, on the food, not the fingers.… Its flavor provides a suitably bland base for the savory contents; its

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