Небольшой английский текст для практики чтения и перевода.
Crisis in a Sesame Bun
Despite the bad publicity surrounding “Mad Cow Disease” in the 1990s, the hamburger remains an icon for the twentieth century. In its provenance, preparation, purchase and very place of consumption it tells in microcosm the history of the century. In each decade its character and its image subtly reflected the shifting fashions and preoccupations of the era.
Its origins are cloaked in an uncertainty that only assists its status as a characterless object to which each generation may add whatever relish it chooses. Its connections with the German city of Hamburg are unclear. Although every culinary civilization has had some form of ground meat patty, most food historians do accept a link with the eponymous Baltic port.
Thus the hamburger enters history as the plain but honest food of poor but ambitious immigrants to the United States. Indeed according to one food expert it had its origins in the fare of a German-owned shipping line on whose vessels in the 1880s, Hamburg beef was minced and then mixed with breadcrumbs, eggs and onions and served with bread.
But it was at the World Fair in St Louis in 1904 that it first became a symbol of mass-produced cuisine. It was there that the bun was first introduced and the result was wildly popular. Soon after, in 1921, the first hamburger chain was established. But generally the burger remained a wholesome home-made dish. Older Americans still cherish childhood memories of Mom grinding good fresh steak and, after adding onion and seasoning, taking the result straight out to the charcoal grill in the garden, but like all things American when exported it has been debased and perverted.
The hamburger first entered British consciousness as part of the post-second world war spending spree, when beef became a symbol of the new prosperity. When in the late 1950s the frozen beefburger was introduced (renamed to avoid unnecessary questions about why it did not taste of ham) the little cake of bland rubbery meat was a glamour product. It was somehow foreign and, of course, frozen, which was then the height of new technology. It was the first of the new range of ‘convenience’ foods which were about to make the world a better place and begin the liberation of women from the drudgery of home-cooking. The older generation did not approve, which made it all the better. In the Sixties the hamburger was a symbol of the techno age – perfectly circular and streamlined. It was as uniform and relentlessly predictable as only the latest technology could make it.
True, there were those who rebelled against it, but to most the hamburger was a reflection of the national love affair with Americana. It was a phenomenon which was made flesh in Seventies London with the trendy burgers of the Great American Disaster and the Hard Rock Cafe, and in many other cities round the world.
In the Eighties another subtle shift occurred. People became aware that America was no longer another place but a culture which had spread throughout the world. And the hamburger became globalized, too, in the form of McDonald’s. With its US home market, like the fat in its burgers, heavily saturated, McDonald’s looked abroad. By the end of the Eighties it had grown to such a size that every day 28 million global citizens ate there and the Big Mac became omnipresent.
McDonald’s stormed the world, but its successes also drew upon it in the Nineties the criticisms which were leveled at that era. Food experts began to see the world’s changing culinary tastes as a symbol of what is wrong with the new consumerism. “The hamburger is a metaphor for our times – cheap, convenient and an indication that we have given up any real interest in what we eat,” said Frances Bissell, lamenting the trends of our increasingly obese society towards snacking on the hoof or before the TV instead of eating proper meals.
Then along came “Mad Cow Disease” and even though the average person was told they had more chance of winning the National Lottery than contracting “Mad Person Disease”, with it came the dreadful realization that the cheap, convenient, easy way out might, in the end, turn out to be none of these things.
