The America vs Australia burger debate - International Travel

Jun 09, 2022

And you might not like what he has to say.

What is a burger? Until relatively recently, I suppose I didn’t know this was a question at all.

Allow me to take you to a simpler time: A bygone era absent of the billowing political and cultural distractions of today, August 2018. During a pristine Brisbane afternoon, I keenly ordered a delicious sounding bacon and egg burger at a delectable, if upscale café. Life is for living, after all, and breakfast on top of a hamburger always represents serious food value. As you may have recognised (though I didn’t), my sandwich arrived with the advertised bacon and egg, but lacking a crucial component: the burger. And for clarification purposes, by burger, I mean the hamburger patty.

It was that day – a day that I have so far been unable to scrub from my cache of unwanted memories – that I learned the heart-stopping concept of the bun doctrine: the notion that what makes a burger a burger in Australia is the bun.

I should backtrack contextually.

I love Australia in so many ways. My girlfriend is a daughter of Queensland, and the case could be made she’s the sweetest human ever. The coffee culture is world class even if – I’m also an Italian citizen – we have different concepts of a cappuccino. My favourite beer, Furphy, hails from Victoria and those that love a good Blueberry will appreciate my attempts to smuggle them back to the United States. Even AFL has its charms – Go Mason Cox! – and the cricket. There’s a long-standing American baseball tradition to try and alter the ball for the pitcher’s benefit, so I can relate. From my perspective, Steve Smith and David Warner are just crafty competitors who know that rules are merely a social construct.

That is all to say, I’m not here looking for a fight. But the tenet that the bun is what makes a burger is irresponsible and should be confronted or questioned by any decent society.

Related story: 50 best burgers for the ultimate night in

In John Stuart Mill’s Marketplace of Ideas, clearly there wasn’t a burger stand – food trucks were apparently not in fashion in 1859. So, if the free flow of ideas is the only way to separate falsehoods, let’s unpack this conviction without spilling the beetroot and pineapple everywhere – which, as toppings, I’m in full support of.

Which brings this address to an important disclaimer: in no way is this intended to disparage the execution, creativity or quality of Aussie beef burgers or burger makers. I actually dig beets on a burger. Although I can imagine they exist, I’ve yet to have a bad hamburger in Australia. And, though for me the sample size is considerably larger, I cannot make that declaration for the continent of my origin, North America.

I also think it’s worth noting that I’m not here to harangue the good public of the Commonwealth as some stubborn, pretentious traditionalist annoyed with the evolving nature of international foodways. The history of hamburgers is an indeterminate and Quixotic narrative seldom espousing verifiability or definition.

Dozens of locations in the States claim invention of the hamburger, with three strong candidates, all between 1881-1905. The name, certainly, references the German city of Hamburg, from where immigrants on the Hamburg-America ship line left port on their crossing of the Atlantic. The Hamburg steak, an early form of the patty of ground meat, found its way between two slices of bread possibly in New York, or Texas, or Oklahoma, or Wisconsin or Connecticut or on the ship itself and eventually became one of America’s few worthwhile exported food traditions (along with Indigenous foodways, fried chicken and barbeque).

The road then, leads back to the patty. Where you would call a piece of fried chicken on a bun a chicken burger, on the opposite side of the Pacific it would require a patty made of chicken. Otherwise, it’s a chicken sandwich. A mushroom burger in Australia consists of an expertly grilled satellite dish of a portabella head on a roll whereas in the States it’d certainly be a less appetizing patty of diced up fungi. But things get a little funky when diagnosing a veggie burger. It seems Australia prescribes to the patty over random vegetables on this occasion. And a hamburger? Is a cheeseburger a slice of gruyere on a bun? Perhaps you see where this path leads.

Does a menu item listed “a burger” with no description come on the plate as a bun with nothing inside? Therefore, a burger, solely reliant on the bun to satisfy its definition, cannot exist conceptually. So I ask, humbly, can we call it a sandwich if it doesn’t have a patty before this madness ends with our mutually assured destruction?

Sincerely,

Mark C. Stevens
A concerned American.

Mark C. Stevens is a filmmaker, traveler and the author of Cooking with Spices: 100 Recipes for Blends, Marinades, and Sauces from Around the World. Follow him on Instagram or Twitter (@markcstevens_) for travel and food writing at Uproxx Life.