Manifest Cholesterol: the Pilgrimage for Stars, Stripes, and Saturated Fat

The hamburger is a miracle of human invention – a glistening, grease-laden monument to appetite and hubris. It is, at once, the most democratic of foods and the most unapologetically lethal. No one – not even the Michelin-starred elite with their tweezers and foam – has improved upon the unholy trinity of beef, bun, and American cheese. The hamburger is perfect precisely because it is imperfect: it drips, it slides, it stains. It is meant to be eaten hunched over a diner table somewhere in the rotund middle of America, under flickering fluorescent light. In a place where the coffee tastes faintly of burnt rubber and the jukebox still takes quarters¹.

Picture it: a plate roughly the size of Nebraska, an archipelago of fries stretching toward the horizon, a limp “salad” composed of lettuce that died bravely in service of aesthetics, and, at the centre, the hamburger itself – your prize, your burden. The bun, tattooed with sesame seeds like an ancient warrior’s scars; the pickles shimmering under the fluorescent light like emeralds in a pawn shop; the patty itself, dripping with enough grease to lube an industrial lathe. The first bite – hot, rich, sweet – is a moment. The second bite is a commitment. By the third, you have crossed into the realm of the metaphysical². Silence has descended over the table as the notion of hunger is obliterated in a festival of fat and joy.

Just this very afternoon I ate a hamburger that could have doubled as a weapon. The waitress – sullen and despondent, who's apron had born witness to several decades of grease-based warfare – handed it to me with the solemnity of a priest offering communion. I swear to you, this burger had gravitational pull. You didn’t eat it so much as enter into orbit around it. Somewhere between the third and fourth bite, I could feel my heart recalibrating its expectations for the future. By the fifth, I knew I’d remember it as fondly as a childhood pet.

Consuming a hamburger is, of course, a deleterious act. That’s part of the magic. A great hamburger is an act of self-destruction performed not just wilfully, but with gusto. We have come to an agreement about cholesterol and triglycerides – and joyfully march to meet our fate. Together you laugh in the face of the Mediterranean diet. It says, “Yes, you will die, we all die, but you shall not be hungry.”³ It is a not just a meal but a sacral ritual. We, who find ourselves together the great diner of life choose not the salad, the salmon, or the soup of the day, we march to the beat of the burger. We who are about to die consume you.

The hamburger,⁴ for all its supposed simplicity, is a profoundly industrial artefact – a triumph of specialisation and global trade masquerading as comfort food. No single farmer, no matter how heroic or agrarian, could produce it alone. The bun depends on wheat milled in one region, sesame seeds imported from another. The cow may have been fattened on soy shipped from Brazil, slaughtered in Kansas, and its meat flash-frozen before being trucked to your local diner. The cheese requires industrial-scale dairy operations; the pickles depend on brine chemistry, glass production, and distribution networks. The ketchup represents the godhead of globalisation and it's great leviathans: sugar, tomatoes, and high fructose corn syrup. Each with its own labour disputes, supply chain, and carbon footprint.

Your hamburger is, in other words in fact an edible expression of neoliberalism – a miracle of logistics, debt, and deregulation. Every bite is a communion wafer of global capitalism, the product of countless invisible hands⁵.

A proper hamburger carries danger in its aroma – that faint hint of burnt fat and metal, like cordite after a gunfight. It makes you feel slightly ashamed and yet profoundly alive. It is, in its own greasy, unapologetic way, the most American object ever conceived: cheap, excessive, violent, and beautiful. It will kill you as surely as a gun – and, if cooked correctly, with the same smoky aftertaste⁶.

So yes, the hamburger is miraculous. It is messy, it is mortal, it is magnificent. To eat one is to participate in a ritual older that calls to the heart of every true patriot. To love the hamburger is to accept that some forms of pleasure are not meant to be optimised, tracked, or improved upon – only enjoyed, bite by glorious, artery-clogging, bite.

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¹ If your hamburger doesn’t come with the distant hum of an aging freezer and the smell of diesel in the parking lot, it’s not real.

² Despite the act of consumption being transcendental, the hamburger – and its effect on my arteries – are both, as my physician recently reminded me, all too real.

³ Nutritionists be damned, eating this discus of grease and pleasure is my calling.

⁴ I say hamburger, but I am of course referring here to the classic cheeseburger, the pickle, sesame seeded bun, the meat, the lettuce and tomato. This is the pinnacle of industrial society. I will not be taking questions.

⁵ And possibly a few child labourers.

⁶ If your hamburger does taste of cordite you might be in a Gordon Ramsey restaurant, consuming a crime against food cooked by a man who shouts at lamb chops on television.

© Alexander Cannon. All disclaimers disclaimable. The author notes that while his heart may feel up for the challenge you should consult your doctor and maybe consider eating some kale.