It's rare that I'm stymied when I call upon my meaty muse, but it has happened two weeks running. No cause for alarm there, I'm sure. But first I was unable to come up with anything good to do about turkey, despite knowing a guy who was cooking one in a specially-made Caja China box. And this past week, after days and days of lying around my Castle of Carnivorous Consumption, making different kinds of Siberian dumplings, I couldn't even get together to produce an emotional essay about same. So I apologize to you, Slashfood reader. You expect better free content from your browsing.

On the other hand, all the time away from composition has given me a leg up on my new, as yet-unnamed book project, a history of the hamburger being written for Yale University Press. I expected the research for this to be tedious, a endless round of fruitless, desolate hours spent before microfilm machines. I went through that in graduate school, and it was a double-disilled buzzkill. One book in ten had something I could use, and there was always some kind of buxom co-ed around to bring me down.

But how times have changed! My hamburger readings last night were an unadulterated pleasure, as enjoyable in their way as a trip to Katz's with an empty stomach. It helped, of course, that I was as high as an April sky; but even a Cannibis Cup winner couldn't make research enjoyable if I wasn't studying something I loved.

And I do love the hamburger. The overlap of meat-appreciation and cultural history is the very heart of my comfort zone, a sweet spot right in my wheelhouse. My soul may have shriveled, and my capacity to exceed shrunk to the size of a dime, but within those limits, I feel like a giant! Thanks and praise be, yet again, to Mark Crispin Miller, my mentor in all matters cultural. It was he who solicited this book from me, and I am poised to deliver what I think will be a whopper. But in the meantime, the research is a pleasure for its own sake.

Sitting there on the tenth floor of NYU's Bobst library, I crouched over a hoard of books, mostly old paperbacks of the kind sold in flea markets, which had been bound in generic hardback. The first one I picked up was Grinding It Out, the autobiography of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. I had always been under the impression that Kroc was a colorless crank, a Mr. Burns-like monopolist with a heart of stone. How wrong I was! It's true that he did go crazy in his later years, spying on a McDonald's across the street from his office to see if someone had left a wrapper on the ground. But as an affluent, middle-aged man hamburger fever took hold on his soul, and never let go. As a businessman, Kroc was a monster of acquisitive, unquestioning ambition and the Protestant work ethic; it's unclear from the book if he ever looked up from the ledger for two minutes altogether. But beneath Kroc's well-known character as a corporate generalissimo, he had the burning sensibility of an aesthete.

Consider this erotically-charged passage from Chapter One, in which Kroc encounters the original McDonald's for the first time. Krock encounters a gorgeous blonde, "who looked like she had lost her way to the Brown Derby or the Paramount cafeteria." This being the fifties, it's not hard to imagine a dotted eye-line from Kroc to a Kim Novak type "demolishing a hamburger and fries with a demure precision." Kroc approaches her, aroused. But he makes clear that it is her appetites that call out to him. Quoth the chairman, in my new all-time favorite quote:

"It was not her sex appeal, but the obvious relish with which she devoured the hamburger that made my pulse hammer with excitement."

Now, can a man who writes that be all dollars and sense? There is a kind of vicarious pornographic glee just in the quoting of it. Eventually, Kroc hoped to instill these same lusts into the the entire world, and succeeded to a nearly-obscene extent: mouths water and eyes goggle at the sight of a McDonald's hamburger in the shadow of the Great Wall, and below the idols of Angor Wat. "Visions of McDonalds restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country paraded through my brain." In Grinding It Out, Kroc is simultaneously pragmatic and quixotic in the special way of capitalist visionaries; and his empire, though vast and sinister, is based on an unwavering love of hamburgers. I feel this too, and deep calls to deep -- even across the grave, and beyond the ocean of corporate hegemony. Kroc may have created the evil empire, but his heart was in the right place, and his devotion to burgers super sized. His muse, it turns out, was my own.