Review Detail

There's No Ham in Hamburgers: Facts and Folklore About Our Favorite Foods

Middle Grade Non-Fiction 336

Fun Food Histroy

April 15, 2021 (Updated: June 15, 2026)

Overall rating

5.0

Writing Style

5.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

5.0

Learning Value

5.0

While I was familiar with most of the information in the book, due to apparently all too frequent deep dives into tomes likes Sussman's Just Heat It 'n' Eat It!: Convenience Foods of the '40s-'60s (2006), Wyman's Spam (1999) and Better Than Homemade, Kimmerle's Candy: The Sweet History (2003), Gitlin's The Great American Cereal Book (2011) as well as everything Jane and Michael Stern ever wrote (especially Road Food (2006) and Square Meals (1984), younger readers will not be. This is an absolute powerhouse of an overview. I'm amazed at how complete the coverage is, and the amount of information that was still new to me. This shed light on why chicken nuggets always seemed like something new: they weren't widely available until I was in high school, at which point the last thing I was interested in was eating processed, deep friend chicken.

Clearly, I have a huge interest in food history, and since middle grade readers have eaten up books like Power Kids Press What's In Your Fast Food series, this is a definite purchase for elementary and middle school libraries. I would even buy it for a high school library, since it has such a wealth of information and is well-indexed, with an extensive bibliography.

Good Points

I'm a sucker for popular culture, especially regarding food. So a brief overview of hamburgers, french fries, pizza, ice cream, chicken fingers, peanut butter, cereal, cookies, and chocolate! Yes, please. And you don't even need an antacid tablet!

Breaking down popular, kid oriented food into these major categories allows room for a wealth of tangential information about things like ketchup, Mr. Potato Head, and Birdseye Frozen Foods! I even learned that the the phrase "I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream" came from a song recorded by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians and written by Howard Johnson! I enjoyed the format of this book, and especially liked the vague 1950s feel to the font and framing of the illustrations. Even the colors were a nice mix of the 2020 ubiquitous light teal with a more 1960s lime green, complete with the sparkly starbursts. I do want to take a look at the illustrations in the print book; the E ARC ones came out a bit wonky.