Almost everybody enjoys a good hamburger, a staple of summer cook outs, fast food menus, dinner tables and almost any place people gather for a meal.

The hamburger has been around for many, many years. The quintessential American sandwich’s cousin, the cheeseburger, has even been romanticized in song by Chief Parrothead Jimmy Buffett in his popular tune “Cheeseburger in Paradise” in which the songwriter reveals his favorite fixin’s when it comes to a burger, stating “I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, big kosher pickle and a cold draught beer.”

According to www.daysoftheyear.com, hamburger began as “garbage meat,” consisting of the leftover meat produced from the butchering process of cutting higher-quality steak cuts. Hamburger also contained the meat remaining after shaping up other cuts as well as muscle tissue that was left after cattle were butchered. Eating hamburger used to mean that you couldn’t afford better meat. The path hamburger took is largely unclear until it eventually ended up the most popular “backyard meal,” the hamburger. The hamburger is now likely to be found in an uncountable number of different locations, featuring versions ranging from amazing to the just plain weird.

This History Channel’s website at www.history.com gives a bit of history on the sandwich:

“The hamburger seems to have made its jump from plate to bun in the last decades of the 19th century, though the site of this transformation is highly contested,” states the History’s website. “Lunch wagons, fair stands and roadside restaurants in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Ohio, New York and Texas have all been put forward as possible sites of the hamburger’s birth. Whatever its genesis, the burger-on-a-bun found its first wide audience at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which also introduced millions of Americans to new foods ranging from waffle ice cream cones and cotton candy to peanut butter and iced tea.”

Celebrating National Hamburger month is easy: Eat a hamburger! So however you like yours cooked, built and arranged, go ahead and enjoy an extra hamburger or two this month.