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there is only one real
hamburger. Start with a lump of ground fatty meat and press it flat. Fry it in
stale grease, top it with a slice of gummy yellow cheese, scatter over it chopped
raw onion and dill pickle, gob on catsup and mayonnaise, crown it with a flaccid
lettuce leaf, clamp it in a doughy sesame-seed bun, and serve it floating on a
sea of fries. The hamburger, the real hamburger, is trash.
When we're in the mood for that kind of trash, however, nothing else will do.
Bite into one and succulent juices immediately start dribbling down the chin. The
teeth sink into the yielding softness of the bun, break through the crisp
resistance of the minced pickle, close around a satisfying mouthful of meat.
Melted cheese coats the roof of the mouth; the sweet-sour tang of catsup,
velvetized by mayo, smothers the taste buds in pleasure, lubricates the tongue.
This is good. Unfortunately, it is good in the exact same way that being drunk
is good ... not the thin enjoyment of a social drink or two, but the bliss of
being absolutely, car-keys-surrenderingly smashed. This is pleasure impossible to
justify in the tongue of civilized discourse. So we tend not to discuss it at
all, except and only when compelled to in the language of reform.
What in God's name got into me? This is a question impossible to
answer. We sweetly mean each word when, facing the gastric aftermath — the
stomach voicing its incredulous dismay and sweat still beading the forehead
— we swear it all away. Too bad that intention has nothing to do with it.
Maybe it would, if it were only the mouth that salivated at the thought of such a
feasting, but this isn't so. Taste is merely the location of the pleasure. Its
source, the origin of the bliss, lies somewhere else ... somewhere that is
primal, visceral, perhaps even feral, and certainly as deeply hostile to the
orderings of good behavior as it is to those of good taste.
Next: The
criminal folly of the "respectable" hamburger 
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