A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc.
It didn’t happen that summer, by the following summer, my wife and I had built a new house, started raising chickens, and established a pretty good-sized garden. I realized that my prior plan hadn’t been ambitious enough"”that wasn’t really from scratch. In fact, to make the buns, I’d need to grind my own wheat, collect my own eggs, and make my own butter. And I’d really need to raise the cow myself (or sheep, and make lamb burgers), mine or extract from seawater my own salt, grow my own mustard plant, etc. This past summer, revisiting the idea, I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat, raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for its rennet to make the cheese, and personally slaughter and process the cow or sheep. At this point I was thinking that this might all add up to an interesting book, and started to consider seriously the undertaking.
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical"”nearly impossible"”to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive"”requiring a trio of cows"”and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors"”in all likelihood, a couple of dozen"”and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.
* * *
The weekend before Thanksgiving, my wife and I had some friends and family members over to the house to slaughter turkeys. We’d raised eight of them from poults, letting them free range around our land for most of their lives, and their time had come. It took the bulk of the day to slit their throats, bleed them out, pluck them, gut them, and put them on ice. Everybody got to take home a turkey that, by all accounts, was delicious. (Nearly everybody has already asked us to do this again next year.) Accompanied by cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple pie, it was a meal that could have been produced almost entirely at our home (and very nearly was). There was no mining of salt, of course, but it proved to be a meal that made sense for the place and the time. It’s really the only such ritual meal in the U.S. for which that’s true.
The Pilgrims established this standard, although in their case they probably had their meal in early October. The Thanksgiving menu at Plymouth Plantation was described by William Bradford:
They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
There’s some fundamental good in eating honestly, I think. Of knowing where your food comes from"”raising it yourself, when you can"”and trying to eat foods that could theoretically have existed a century ago. But you can’t take that but so far, or else the whole thing breaks down. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
I make my burgers from wild venison. There’s a third of your livestock problem solved right there. Lettuce and tomato are optional anyhow. Grow mustard and wheat. Maybe raise a goat to milk and make cheese from. Use wild thistle in place of rennet for the cheese. This can be done more easily than you describe.
By the way, the best burger I ever had in my life was made from wild Canada goose:
http://vimeo.com/30366179
Posted by Jackson Landers on 3 December 2011 @ 10pm
It’s the “I, Pencil” of cheeseburgers!
Posted by James Tauber on 4 December 2011 @ 1am
I’d never heard of “I, Pencil,” but, yes, that’s perfect!
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 4 December 2011 @ 9am
We like to get our food as close to home as possible, raising quite a bit, getting a lot from local farmers at the market or directly, and finally sourcing the rest from elsewhere, though I try to draw the line so as not to go beyond North America. (That said, I have not been able to find a nice butter made from grass fed cows unless going as far as Ireland. Any suggestions for something closer to home?)
For Thanksgiving, we try to up the ante and serve food and wine that has been produced within a 50 mile radius. It is surprisingly easy to do, though more expensive for sure when you have to pay $4 or more per pound for a turkey. Next year I am definitely going to try raising my own turkeys as I am hoping to up the ante still further and serve mostly food from my own farm for the meal. Wine will still have to come from the neighbor’s pressing, and the wheat will be interesting, but I think can handle the rest. We may have to forgo the cranberries, though…
Posted by Malena on 4 December 2011 @ 9am
U MEEN I CANT HAS CHEEZBURGER?
Posted by Barry Freed on 4 December 2011 @ 9am
I believe tomatoes can be had anywhere from mid summer to the first frost, depending on the variety. All other ingredients could be prepped ahead of time to some degree and frozen. Although that is a recent luxury, it would not be cheating.
Don’t forget growing some kind of fruit or grain to make vinegar for the mustard.
If you still think it isn’t ambitious enough, you could also domesticate new wheat, lettuce, tomato, onion, and mustard species from wild species. :-P
Posted by Tim McCormack on 4 December 2011 @ 11am
I enjoy the plastic taste of my processed, frozen food. But I would pay huge amounts of money to eat your home-made (literally) food!
Posted by Natalya on 4 December 2011 @ 12pm
Your basic problem here is that you’re trying to cover a range of taskss and food sources that few people could have done even in colonial times. Humans do not normally live on single farms in the midst of a howling desert! From ancient times, they’ve been prone to specialize in particular products or tasks, then trade with their neighbors.
The folks down by the meadow have cows; one of them slaughtered an extra one, and trades or sells the meat. Another kept an extra milk cow, because his wife’s pretty good at making cheese (which stores through the year — that’s what it’s *for*). Both of them get grain from the farmers who planted extra fields, and all of them take their grain to the miller down by the river to have it ground.
None of this is exclusive (after all, a cow can pull a plow too, and graze on a fallow field), and probably most folks had their own chickens and a truck garden, but the vagaries of agriculture mean that there’s usually somebody with a surplus of X, and usually someone else willing to trade X for Y. And then there’s the folks living in town, who are happy to buy extra eggs and milk, while selling the stuff they make (tools, clothing…) or transport from other areas.
That “first Thanksgiving” was notable in large part not merely because it was a “first harvest”, but because it meant that the colony as a whole had gotten all their supplies in order, and established that they had a decent chance of surviving the winter.
Posted by David Harmon on 4 December 2011 @ 8pm
Well said David! It takes a community to do most things, including sourcing the ingredients for a cheeseburger. :)
Posted by malena on 4 December 2011 @ 11pm
This reminds me of http://ruhlman.com/2009/06/blt-from-scratchsummertime-challenge/ http://ruhlman.com/2009/08/blt-challenge-update/ http://ruhlman.com/2009/09/my-blt-from-scratch/ http://ruhlman.com/2009/09/blt-from-scratch-the-winners/
Posted by Josh Baugher on 5 December 2011 @ 8am
In Pennsylvania, we always had early crops of lettuce (say, through the end of June, usually). In a really good year, the lettuce hasn’t quite gone bitter when the first tomatoes pink up.
Posted by Ted Strong on 5 December 2011 @ 11am
If our education presented this kind of challenge to children we may have a hope of them understanding that society is defined by what it can produce and the ingredients, such as organization, culture, resources, tools… it uses to do it. Many societies are very limited in what they can produce while ours is limited in what it wants to produce because we seek to produce by a high gross margin corporate approach. Second element of society is to distribute what it produced. We distribute chunk of wealth to the general power structure and institutions which protect it, such as military, ivy’s. The 1% who hoard wealth then endow it around, are now substantially different than let say in the 19th century, because our resources, markets and labor have become global and so to protect our power structure means to have international focus. So, nearly everything and anything we can buy in USA is impossible to recreate within a small social group, whether they are generalists or specialists. Some small exceptions exist, Amish etc. American society is a global one. Most of our citizens are detached form meaningful production and social contribution to their local community, even to their own children’s education. Hence we are profoundly alienated. Cooking from scratch as we do in Pilgrims tradition reminds us of times when that wasn’t the case.
Posted by Senja on 5 December 2011 @ 12pm
[...] Written by Johan on December 5, 2011 – 6:30 pm Via the indispensable Jason Kottke, I found this interesting article on the difficulties of making something as ordinary as a cheeseburger from scratch. Further [...]
Posted by johaneriksson.se » Blog Archive » Market Miracles, Cheeseburger Edition on 5 December 2011 @ 12pm
Your leap from the impracticality of a single person simultaneously producing all the ingredients to make a cheeseburger from scratch to the assertion that a cheesebuger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society is way off the mark. Your suggestions that tomatoes, lettuce, beef, cheese and butter not being freshly available simultaneously is simply wrong. Producing all the components solo would be difficult and wildly expensive but that's a stunt and has nothing to do with availability of the fresh ingredients. Moreover the invention and availability of cheeseburgers doesn’t say much if anything about the availability of fresh ingredients required to make it. David Harmon's point above is right on.
Posted by J. Fonteneau on 5 December 2011 @ 12pm
Your leap from the impracticality of a single person simultaneously producing all the ingredients to make a cheeseburger from scratch to the assertion that a cheesebuger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society is way off the mark.
I’m not saying that a time-traveler with unlimited funds couldn’t coax something cheeseburger-like into existence in 1650 CE. I’m saying that it’s so completely impractical (see the title) that it wouldn’t"”and, indeed, didn’t"”happen. It would be an utterly illogical food. For instance, slaughtering a cow in the summer would get you branded as a fool, because not only was refrigeration not available *, but because there’s still lots of grass available for grazing, meaning that there’s still more free input available to produce more meat at a near-zero cost. Anybody who wants to make a meal “from scratch” in this hard-core sense would do far better making a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, a meal that could have existed"”and, indeed, did"”in 1650 CE.
* Which reminds me of an old joke. A man is visiting a neighboring farm when he spies a pig with a peg leg. He asks the farmer what happened to the pig. The farmer tells a long story about how the pig once saved his life, dragging the farmer out of his burning home. The neighbor asks if perhaps the pig lost his leg in the daring rescue. “Oh, no,” replies the farmer, “I roasted his leg a few months back. A pig like this, you don’t eat all at once!”
Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 5 December 2011 @ 12pm
On the impracticality of a computer:
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