Am really enjoying the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series and this one did not disappoint. Very interesting and though provoking. Well researched facts without being judgy.

Another interesting little book from the Object Lessons series. I particularly enjoyed this one as it is one of the more straightforward ones – some of them tend to be a bit airy-fairy and esoteric and I like facts! Here we have an account of the history, development, definition and future of the humble – or perhaps not-so-humble – burger. The author explores its cultural and societal significance, and even manages to bring in gender politics. Who’d have thought there was so much to say about that often maligned meat patty. Entertaining and informative.

I read this over the course of three work trips, eating burgers in hotel restaurants alone (that's why it took me so long to read – I don't often eat burgers or in hotel restaurants, but it seemed appropriate). I did find this interesting, and it was a great balance of factual historical detail and sociological analysis. However, at times the author's opinions on whether we should or shouldn't eat meat (she very clearly thinks we shouldn't) affected the otherwise quite fairly-balanced text. I do love the Object Lessons series though – I'm happy to read all of them.

Everything (plus more) that anyone wants or needs to know about burgers.

Burger is part of a Bloomsbury Academic series of object lessons. Each brief book takes a noun and writes an interesting essay about it. Each is written by a different author. I really enjoyed Souvenir (link to its review: http://dianereviewsbooks.com/souvenir ), which I gave 4 stars. It was chock full of relevant and not-well-known information about the history and reason for souvenirs.

Burger fails, at least to me, to meet the interesting requirement of this series. It starts well with the history of cattle beginning as aurochs. Those are the same animals depicted in famous French cave art circa 17000 BC. It explains how the overhunting of the Buffalo after the Civil War allowed for free cattle grazing on government land and cattle drives to centralized Chicago slaughterhouses. There was also a chapter explaining how dairy cows are slaughtered in detail. It included a brief discussion of the first burger chain, White Castle, and burger drive-thru, Jack in the Box.

However, subsequent chapters were not to my taste and seemed off subject. How the names of burgers like the Thickburger and the Whopper were covertly referring to men’s erections. How commercials showing woman eating large burgers were implying they were experienced eating large meat (wink, wink). Some of the topics seemed to have been found by a random Google search. For example, how Vietnam and World War I had “burger terms”, Hamburger Hill and the Meat Grinder respectively, for battlefields where soldiers’ odds were not good. The Mad Cow disease scare, anti-animal rights acts, greenhouse gases caused by cows and several chapters on veggie and laboratory burgers’ history and future seemed added just to reach a certain word count or perhaps to further a meatless agenda. Overall, I can’t recommend this book. 1 star.

Thanks to the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

I didn't know that the author was a vegan prior to reading this book but you learned that quickly. I think she was paid per use of "cow flesh" although I lost track of how many times she did. I'd be curious to see how a vegan or stronger feminist took her book.

Still, I enjoyed her take on the burger's role through American political, social and physical history. It's kind of crazy the paths a simple food item has taken. While many books cover Ray Kroc, fewer look into White Castle, Carl's/Hardees, Burger KIng and the others that have littered the American landscape over time.. I hadn't remembered Burger King's Whopper Virgins promotions and its historical overlay with the colonies was a wonderful rabbit hole.

Although I didn't enjoy this as much as the others in the Object Lessons series, I was glad to have had the chance to read it.

This series seems to be self-consciously launched out of Barthes' Mythologies, each one offering up a riff on a common, often pedestrian, mundane, and over-looked object - here the burger.

Siting this somewhere between an essay, a piece of journalism, and a cultural history, Adams is a witty commentator and manages to pack in a huge amount of material, some expected (the history of McDonalds, for example), some weirdly, wonderfully unpredictable: burgers and feminism, burgers and pornography, as a er... taster.

Throughout, this is droll and sharp ('as the hamburger business grew, so did the size of the hamburger. Soon their names seemed to be recalling the way men discuss their erections: The Thick Burger, The Whopper, The Big Mac, The Big Boy, The Chubby Boy') - and at around a hour/hour and a half, this is an ideal 'thought-piece' read for a commute.

Burger by Carol J. Adams is a look at perhaps the most American sandwich. Adams is a feminist-vegan advocate, activist, and independent scholar and the author of numerous books including her pathbreaking The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, now in a Bloomsbury Revelations edition celebrating its 25th anniversary. She is the co-editor of several important anthologies, including most recently Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (with Lori Gruen). The Carol J. Adams Reader: Writings and Conversations 1995-2015 appeared in the fall of 2016.

I didn’t know anything about the author when I picked up this book and myself, a vegetarian, questioned why I picked it up.  Hamburgers are ground beef and something that I no longer eat, but there is something about a burger that goes back to childhood cookouts, Fourth of July barbeques, and that feeling of, for lack of a better word, America.  I have tried the many veggie burgers out there and they have gotten much better over the years, but there is something about the ideal of  burger that is missing.  It’s much like when a meat eater grabs a turkey burger bites in and something just isn’t quite the same.  

I am old enough to remember the days of a neighborhood butcher shop with a side of beef in the back and the butchers cutting meat for customers.  Adams also mentions that older people never cared for prepackaged ground beef.  One was expected to pick a piece chuck or sirloin and asked to have it ground.  I recall the same experience in the 1980s in Western Europe.  There may not have been a real reason for that back then, but today in the age of pink slime and industrial scale slaughterhouses your beef burger can have the DNA of 1,000 different cows.  That piece of beef that used to make your burger now comes from countless pieces.  

Adams covers the history of the burger as well as paying tribute to its place in America from the hamburger stand to McDonald's to LBJ’s special burger.  Of course, there are the aspects of industrial-scale slaughter, waste holding ponds, and methane production. Alternatives are also covered as well as a history of veggie burgers and now companies involved in animal product sales are interested in them.  Tyson now owns 5% of Beyond Meat, a pea protein-based vegan meat substitute.  

Bloomsbury Academic releases this series “Object Lessons” on common items and their secret lives and histories.  Common items have more of a story to them one usually expects.  Burger is an excellent addition to a well-written series.

I admittedly opened up “Burger” expecting a work that was going to be first and foremost a history, with very quick snippets about various cultural aspects sprinkled throughout. Suffice to say, my assumptions did not match up to reality. The history is only one part of a very in-depth overview, which covered everything from the environmental effects of burger consumption, to the themes of sexual objectification that are still so shockingly prevalent in its marketing nearly all across the board, and all the way to the fascinatingly rich history of vegetarian burger substitutes.

As I read, I found that the burger speedily transformed from something that I still occasionally enjoy into a symbol of unsustainable production systems, environmental degradation, toxically outdated ideas of masculinity, and overall something that I personally feel more inclined to avoid. However, this isn’t a result of heavy-handed sermonizing from the author. Rather, if anything it feels more like the natural progression of Adams’ succinct but still fairly detailed overviews of the burger’s past, its present impact here in the modern day, and it’s potentially brighter, plant-based future (a future that frankly now feels like it can’t come soon enough for this reader).

For anyone who enjoys a good microhistory, or would simply like to know all the ins and outs of this all-American food, this is a very informative and enjoyable work that can be easily knocked out in the course of a day.

I've defined this series on multiple occasions in the past as discursive, academic, autobiographical tomes that look at things you'd never consider being worthy of a book to themselves, the bookshelf being one such instance (and one instance of the series being completely successful and enjoyable). There have been countless volumes about the burger, however - yet this one is a prime cut among the reconstituted pink shit. You need cattle ferried to the US by the Spanish invaders, and land stolen from the Natives, and the typical American immigrant to invent a typical American hamburger. And nowadays you have to account for all the ecological waste it takes in producing it - the land for the cattle, the water and other resources it wastes, and the methane it farts out. And you have to weigh up that you're eating a lump of gunk whose meat content could fit in a matchbox, and that can still contain the DNA of up to a 1000 animals. Any page of this book will testify as to why such a thing is worth such erudite discussion, any page will prove this is accessible to almost all readers, and any page with its lack of the personal pronoun will show this series the way to go. Very good indeed, if never exactly something to be read solely for pleasure. Four and a half stars.

An interesting exposé of burgers and all the things related to this deliciousness. The book was very well researched.

A Burger is in the Eye of the Beholder

** Trigger warning for allusions to violence against women, and actual violence against nonhuman animals. **

Toward the end of a very long evening in which Harold and Kumar overcome a variety of obstacles in their pursuit of a White Castle hamburger, Kumar makes a speech about the meaning of immigration to the United States. In his telling, hamburgers form the heart of being a citizen of the United States.

“So you think this is just about the burgers, huh? Let me tell you, it’s about far more than that. Our parents came to this country, escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger. Hunger, Harold. They were very, very hungry. They wanted to live in a land that treated them as equals, a land filled with hamburger stands. And not just one type of hamburger, okay? Hundreds of types with different sizes, toppings, and condiments. That land was America. America, Harold! America! Now, this is about achieving what our parents set out for. This is about the pursuit of happiness. This night . . . is about the American dream.”

The symbolism of the hamburger may seem fixed (equal to the entire United States), yet Kumar did not consume White Castle hamburgers in the movie scenes. The actor who plays Kumar, Kal Penn (Kalpen Suresh Modi) is a vegetarian and ate veggie burgers. Ten years before White Castle introduced a vegetarian slider to its customers, they custom-made veggie sliders for Penn to consume as Kumar.

###

Why do the history and technologies of violence central to the hamburger remain unacknowledged? The violence could be invoked as a reminder of masculine identity and conservatism, something [Michael] Pollan himself celebrates when he goes boar hunting. It could also have been claimed as part of the human identity.
True, the bovine is more pacific and in general less dangerous than a carnivore; killing a bovine might be seen as a less virile activity than killing carnivores. Still, a narrative of violence might have been developed to celebrate hamburger eating. The question becomes not how do we understand the violence at the heart of the hamburger, but why isn’t the hamburger celebrated for the violence at its heart?

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Published by Bloomsbury, Object Lessons “is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.” I was both surprised and a little exhilarated to see that the author of BURGER, the latest addition to the series, is none other than ecofeminist Carol J. Adams, she of THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT fame. If anyone could restore the absent referent – the 32.5 million+ cows slaughtered annually in the U.S. alone – to a conversation about hamburgers, it would be her.

Since this is my first experience with Object Lessons, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The book is both wider ranging and perhaps more scattershot than I anticipated. Particularly in the early chapters, Adams adopts a writing style that feels almost stream of consciousness, which often left me a feeling a little discombobulated. (To be fair, I read an early copy six months ahead of the release date; the finished copy will likely be a little more polished. This goes double for the weird and obviously incomplete formatting, which made the narrative even harder to follow.)

Adams brings a vegan-feminist perspective to the, ahem, table; your thoughts on this will likely vary according to your own dietary and ethical preferences. Personally, I loved it; I think Adams shines brightest when addressing the intersection of animal exploitation and misogyny, such as in chapter four, “Woman Burger”. (Pro tip: if you enjoyed this, definitely pick up THE PORNOGRAPHY OF MEAT – which, imho, is much more accessible than THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT, and thus perfect for newcomers to the topic.)

Even though I’ve read quite a lot of her previous work, it’s clear that there’s still so much to learn; her discussion of Seventh-day Adventists’ (led by women members) influence on early veggie burgers, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s demand for day care and cooked-food services, proved fascinating. There are so many random little factoids (see e.g. barbed wire’s contribution to animal agriculture) sprinkled like tasty little morsels throughout BURGER. Perhaps it requires a second reading to truly savor it all?

Yet what makes this book stand out is also what works against it: any book about the cultural significance of the hamburger that weighs in at a mere 160 pages (less if you exclude the references, which are many) is bound to feel incomplete. Still, it’s a compelling read, and just might encourage casual readers to explore some of Adams’s other work. (We can only hope!)

3.5 stars.


Table of contents
1. Citizen Burger
2. Hamburger
3. Cow Burger
4. Woman Burger
5. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Burger and Other Modernist Hamburger Identity Crises
6. Veggie Burger
7. Moon Shot Burger
Afterword: Slippage
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index


** Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley. **

As the author of ‘The Sexual Politics of Meat’ and ‘The Pornography of Meat’, Carol J. Adams is very well placed to write a book on the cultural history of the burger for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. In her slim volume this cheap single-portion edible protein source is carefully considered from multiple perspectives, including interspecies history, environmental history, national history and gender politics.

The elements you’d expect to see – the McDonald Brothers and Ray Kroc, Burger King, Wendy’s and other hamburger-centred franchises; veggie burgers; plant-based burgers; and clean meat burgers (using meat grown through cellular agriculture) – are all covered, and in addition there are interesting sidelights on topics such as the popular association in the United States between democratic rights and animal flesh eating; or the way in which the production line disassembly of carcasses at meatpacking plants inspired Ford’s assembly line production of cars, which in turn inspired the McDonald brothers’ hamburger assembly line.

Adams is a self-proclaimed vegan-feminist and traditional ground beef hamburgers, or, more precisely, those who produce and sell that product, are clearly the villains of her text.

She certainly makes out a persuasive case for the ecological damage attendant upon the beef industry, in terms of fossil fuel use, ground-water depletion, agricultural chemical pollution and methane and ammonia emissions, as well as making out a strong case for alternative forms of burgers being just as, or even more, tasty and considerably more environmentally friendly.

It is a pity, though, that the author’s passion for her cause sometimes tempts her into making problematic statements. For example, isn’t it something of a leap to claim that the fact that a Korean War conflict was named Pork Chop Hill, whilst a battle in the Vietnam War was named Hamburger Hill reflects the fact that cow flesh consumption outpaced pig flesh consumption from 1960, especially given that in the former instance the relevant topography vaguely resembled a pork chop? And whilst it may be true that “The fast-food hamburger industry floods popular culture with depictions of the sexual objectification of women” it is sadly hardly unique in that. In fact the real challenge would be in finding a product which has not, at some time in its history, been marketed by means of the sexual objectification of women.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting book, literally full of much food for thought, and a worthy addition to an impressive series.

Another great entry in the series on everyday objects, Adams offers a kaleidoscopic cultural history--the domestication of cows, Boca burgers, the founding of McDonalds, slaughterhouses, Hamburger Hill, Hardee's lewd advertising campaigns, mad cow disease and Harold and Kumar.