Street View Street Food
Hamburger
History
Residents of Hamburg, New York, which was named after
Hamburg, Germany, attribute the hamburger to Ohioans
Frank Menches and Charles Menches. According to
legend, the Menches brothers were vendors at the 1885
Erie County Fair (then called the Buffalo Fair) when they
ran out of sausage for sandwiches and used beef instead.
They named the resulting sandwich after the location of
the fair. However, Frank Menches’s obituary in The New
York Times stated, instead, that these events took place
at the 1892 Summit County Fair in Akron, Ohio.
Culture
The hamburger’s international popularity demonstrates
the larger globalization of food that also includes
the rise in global popularity of other national dishes,
including the (Italian) pizza, and Japanese sushi. The
hamburger has spread from continent to continent
perhaps because it matches familiar elements in
different culinary cultures. This global expansion
provides economic points of comparison like the Big
Mac Index, by which one can compare the purchasing
power of different countries where the Big Mac
hamburger is sold.
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