Burger Day was created to vaunt the glories of this most perfect of meals, technically a sandwich, really a whole meal.
- Burgers were said to be invented in Hamburg, Germany, or to be more precise the meat that would become the hamburger was. Ground beef used to be considered a waste product, the leftovers of the prime cuts that were then sold off on the cheap.
- During WWI, the US Gov’t tried to rename hamburgers as ‘liberty sandwiches.’
- In 1921, Walter A Anderson (a short order cook) and E.W. Ingram (an insurance exec) founded White Castle, the oldest burger chain, in Wichita, Kansas. Their first burger sold for a nickel.
- The Big Mac was introduced in 1968 and sold for 49 cents
- On average, Americans eat three hamburgers a week. That’s a national total of nearly 50 billion burgers per year.enough to circle the earth at least 32 times.
- The NYC Food Truck 666 Burger offers a $666 burger coined the “Douche Burger.” It’s made with a Kobe beef patty (wrapped in gold leaf), foie gras, caviar, lobster, truffles, imported ages, gruyere cheese (melted in champagne steam) kopi luwak bbq sauce and himalayan rock salt.
- The Hamburger Hall of Fame is located in Seymour, WI.
- There are several theories about the origins of the cheeseburger. One story claims that the cheeseburger was created between 1924 and 1926 by a chef named Lionel Sternberger. As the story goes, a homeless man dining at Sternberger’s restaurant in Pasadena, California, suggested the addition of a slice of cheese to his hamburger order. Sternberger complied, eventually added it to his menu, and the rest is history.
- Denver lays claim to the invention of the cheeseburger. In 1935, Louis Ballast of Humpty Dumpty Drive-In was awarded the trademark, yet he never enforced it.
- The popular Jimmy Buffett song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” was inspired by a boat trip Buffett took. Hampered by bad weather and tired of the canned food and peanut butter stocked aboard, Buffett found himself continually craving a cheeseburger. When the boat finally docked on the island of Tortola, Buffett was able to order the cheeseburger he had been fantasizing about.
- Mayor McCheese, the giant cartoon cheeseburger who served as the mayor of McDonaldland from 1971-1985, was at the center of a lawsuit filed against McDonalds over the character’s resemblance to H.R. Pufnstuf. It was settled in 1977.
- The Library of Congress credits Louis Lassen, a Danish immigrant, owner of Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut as the creator of the hamburger as we know it.
- The hamburger gained national recognition at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair when the New York Tribune referred to the hamburger as “the innovation of a food vendor on the pike”.
- Due to widely anti-German sentiment in the U.S. during World War I, an alternative name for hamburgerswas Salisbury steak. Following the war, hamburgers became unpopular until the White Castle restaurant chain marketed and sold large numbers of small 2.5-inch square hamburgers, known as sliders.
- Worldwide, McDonald’s sells 75 hamburgers per second!
- In 2004-2005, McDonalds paid rappers to mention Big Macs in their songs and paid them $5 each time their songs got played on the radio.
- According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hamburger was first abbreviated to burger in 1939.
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