Hamburgers make up a big part of the fast food industry, and so they make up a big part of American dining in general, but it wasn’t always so. If you go back to the early twentieth century Americans had very different attitudes toward the simple burger.

Simply put, they didn’t trust it. Hamburger is made from ground up beef and back then was something of a byproduct of the butcher trade. It was where the butcher put all the remaining scraps after cutting up a beef carcass, along with the tougher cuts of meat. Almost anything could be included in a pound of ground-up hamburger.

This meant that hamburger was cheap, which in turn meant that it was used in food operations where price was preferential to quality.  Hamburgers were popular at county fairs, and they and their brethren-in-food—the hot dog—were sold by street vendors in cities across the country.  The fact that these low-class and fly-by-night joints sold hamburgers further reduced the burger’s esteem in many peoples’ eyes.

Because of this, the meat industry and restauranteurs started working to change the hamburger’s bad reputation. For its part, the meat industry helped pass a law that legally defined hamburger as being 100 percent beef (and this law is still in effect—anything labelled “hamburger” has to be 100% beef). No longer could hamburger be made from beef, pork, and whatever other animal scraps might be left behind at the packing plant. While this law might have been intended to increase the public’s trust of hamburger, the law certainly did not say what parts of the cow–innards, tongue, or even hooves–could legally be included in hamburger.

The fact that hamburger was cheap led to some restaurants focusing on producing hamburgers for the public. White Castle was America’s first hamburger chain, and it, too, had to fight the perception that hamburger was a low class, dirty food. The name was carefully chosen to evoke ideas of cleanliness and the upper class. The grill was placed in full view of customers so they could see what was being cooked, and the meat was supposedly delivered fresh twice a day.

The company even went so far to prove that hamburgers were harmless that they sponsored an experiment at the University of Minnesota where, for 13 weeks, a medical student lived on nothing but White Castle hamburgers and water. He was as healthy at the end of the experiment as he was at the beginning, and White Castle used that to show customers they had nothing to fear from eating their burgers.

Hamburgers are far more popular today than they were back then, and White Castle’s popularity was long ago eclipsed by the likes of McDonald’s and Burger King.  Still, the nagging questions about health remain—even if the hamburgers today are made from high-grade meat, are they healthy?  You might be able to survive eating nothing but White Castle’s sliders, but it sure wouldn’t be a good existence.