(My response for this week's writing prompt.)
"Write About Names"
"There isn't actually ham in a 'hamburger', you know," we've all said to each other in an effort to sound smarter than we perhaps actually are. Sad attempts to impress others with common knowledge aside, one cannot deny the truth: hamburgers, the cooked patties of ground up beef, do not contain ham. Curiously, however, the opposite is true of chicken burgers which are in fact made up of chicken. Perhaps the truly clever observation could then be that hamburgers are not made of ham but are still burgers, while chicken burgers are made of chicken. Since they are indeed made of chicken, could the inverse rule apply and can we state that chicken burgers are not burgers?
Definitely. Chicken burgers are not true burgers. A true burger comes not from its name or from the shape of its bun, but the process in which it was created. The word "hamburger" has its own history to attest to that. And while it is unlikely that this current misnomer will ever go out of favour any time soon, it leaves a sense of satisfaction in knowing that if peers can't be impressed with cleverness, they can always be kept attentive with useless knowledge.
As most people know, the word "hamburger" comes from the German city of Hamburg, where locals developed a dish of pounded meat called "Hamburg steaks" in the mid nineteenth century. While the named dish came out of the eighteen-hundreds, the actual practise of seasoning and pounding or shredding meat for both ease of travel as well as eating goes back even further to earlier German barbarian tribes of the Middle Ages. After taking that into consideration, the true definition of a "hamburger" lies not by its shape or its origins, but by the processed meat itself. Shredded and pounded meat leads to the modern day meat-grinder; as such, ground meat seasoned and cooked into patties makes for the true etymological definition for the hamburger.
So now we return to chicken burgers. While true that there are indeed "chicken burgers" cooked with ground chicken meat, many people instead make them with chicken fillets: whole, sliced pieces of poultry. Aside from being placed in round buns and topped in a similar manner, the true "burger" aspect of the "chicken burger" is completely lacking. Really, "burgers" made with chicken filets would probably be better described as "chicken sandwiches"; while all burgers are sandwiches, not all sandwiches are burgers.
All the same, though, that particular name more immediately brings up a far different style of sandwich made from sliced deli meats and sliced bread. And, in all fairness, chicken burgers are just another point in a long list of accepted food-related misnomers like head cheese, prairie oysters, and modern mincemeat pies. So in a way, even if most chicken hamburgers are not really burgers, the name is not likely to change any time soon and fast food consumers are not going to drop their naming scheme for something as trivial as logic.
Besides, if logic applied to fast food, who would eat it?
