Medium Raw

The hamburger is different. It’s a more intimate relationship. Unlike the pre-cooked German import, the hot dog, the hamburger—or ground beef—has been embraced as an expression of our national identity. The backyard barbeque, Mom’s meatloaf—these are American traditions, rights of passage.

Is it too much to feel that it should be a basic right that one can cook and eat a hamburger without fear? To stand proud in my backyard (if I had a backyard), grilling a nice medium-rare fucking hamburger for my kid—without worrying that maybe I’m feeding her a shit sandwich? That I not feel the need to cross-examine my mother, should she have the temerity to offer my child meatloaf?

I shouldn’t have to ask for this—or demand it—or even talk about it. It’s my birthright as an American, God damn it. And anybody who fucks with my burger, who deviates from the time-honored bond that one has come to expect of one’s burger vendor—that what one is eating is inarguably “beef” (not necessarily the best beef, mind you, but definitely recognizable as something that was, before grinding, mostly red, reasonably fresh, presumably from a steer or cow, something that your average Doberman would find enticing)—anybody selling burgers that can’t even conform to that not particularly high standard is, in my opinion, unpatriotic and un-American, in the truest, most heartfelt sense of those words.

If you are literally serving shit to American children, or knowingly spinning a wheel where it is not unlikely that you will eventually serve shit—if that’s your business model? Then I got no problems with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I’ll hold the spoon.

In this way, me and the PETA folks and the vegetarians have something in common, an area of overlapping interests. They don’t want us to eat any meat. I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat.

PETA doesn’t want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle-deep in their own crap, because they don’t want any animals to die—ever—and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat.

Many people will tell you it is America’s distorted relationship with what, in grammar school, we used to know as the “food triangle”—a hierarchy of food that always led up to meat—that’s killing us slowly, clogging our airports and thoroughfares with the ever larger, ever slower-moving morbidly obese, huffing and puffing their way to an early grave. That our exploding health-care costs are increasingly attributable to what we eat (and how much) rather than, say, cigarettes—or even drugs. Which is fine, I guess, in a personal-choice kind of way if, as with heroin, you play and are then willing to pay.

I like to think of myself as leaning toward libertarianism—I am very uncomfortable when the government says that it has to step in and make that most fundamental of decisions for us: what we should or shouldn’t put in our mouths. In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted—and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like—until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has.

Our insatiable lust for cheap meat is, in fact, fucking us up. Our distorted expectations of the daily meal are undermining the basic underpinnings of our society in ways large and small. That we’re becoming a nation that (in the words of someone much smarter than I) is solely “in the business of selling cheeseburgers to each other” is pretty undeniable—if you add that we are, at even our most privileged end, in the business of lending money to people who sell cheeseburgers to each other.

The cruelty and ugliness of the factory farm—and the effects on our environment—are, of course, repellent to any reasonable person. But it’s the general lowering of standards inherent in our continuing insistence on cheap burgers—wherever they might come from and however bad they taste; the collective, post-ironic shrug we’ve come to give each other as we knowingly dig into something that tastes, at best, like cardboard and soured onion—that’s hurting us.

In the America not ruled by the imperative to buy and sell cheap ground meat, however, something has been happening to my beloved hamburger, something about which I have mixed emotions. The slow, creeping influence of the “boutique” burger, the “designer” burger.