“Build Your Best Burger” – A Fun, Free Activity!

Top 10 Fun Facts about Hamburgers

1. From Germany with love. While there are many stories about who invented the hamburger as we know it today, the origin of the word “Hamburger” is not in question. In the 19th century, the city of Hamburg, Germany, was famous for its beef patties, which were served raw or lightly cooked. German immigrants brought this culinary tradition to the United States where it evolved into the modern-day hamburger.
2. Make mine with cheese please. It wasn’t until 1920 that a slice of cheese was added to a hamburger. The only reason it was added is because a 16-year-old boy named Lionel accidentally burned a hamburger while working at his father’s sandwich shop in California. In an attempt to save it, he placed a slice of cheese on top, creating the first-ever scrumptious cheeseburger.
3. The biggest burger ever! In 2012, hamburger lovers surpassed all the previous records by making the Guinness World Record for the largest hamburger ever made. It weighed in at a staggering 2,014 pounds (914 kg)! This gigantic burger was cooked up in Minnesota.
4. Americans LOVE their hamburgers! Americans eat more hamburgers than any other country in the world. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, Americans consume more than 50 billion hamburgers a year, which is almost three burgers per week for every person in the country.
5. Line them up! If all the burgers eaten by Americans in a year were arranged in a straight line, it would circle the earth 32 times!
6. See more in Seymour. In 1885, Charles Nagreen, a lad of 15, was selling meatballs at the Outagamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin, without much success. People wanted to move freely around the festival without the need to eat at his stand. So, this enterprising teenager decided to flatten his hamburger steak and insert it between two slices of bread so people could move freely around the fair while eating his sandwich. His creation was called “Hamburger Charlie,” and to this day many people consider young Charlie Nagreen to be the father of the modern hamburger.
   If you’re in the area and feeling hungry, you can visit the Hamburger Hall of Fame in Seymour, which features the world’s largest collection of hamburger items.
7. All Shook Up. Elvis Presley loved burgers and experimented with using other ingredients on his hamburgers, such as bananas, peanuts, syrup, and eggs.
8. Where’s the beef? Burgers around the world are served differently than those in America. In India, where beef is banned, hamburgers are made of lamb, salmon, tuna and chicken. In Mexico, hamburgers are served with ham on top. In Japan, hamburgers are bun-less.
9. A nickel? White Castle was founded in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, and is the oldest hamburger chain in the country. Their steam-fried hamburgers originally sold for a nickel.
10. McDonald’s is my kind of place. When it comes to burgers, McDonald’s is the king of kings. No one sells more hamburgers than McDonald’s, clocking in at 300 billion burgers sold to date. In fact, McDonald’s sells an astonishing 75 burgers every second! From its humble beginnings in California in 1940, McDonald’s has become the largest global fast-food chain in the world, with over 40,000 restaurant locations in over 100 countries.