The Cheese Burger is a common, if easy, staple in American cuisine. One man quickly found that, up until a century ago, the cheese burger couldn’t possibly have existed. Here’s why:

• If you truly want to start from scratch you have to raise your own cow, mine your own salt, grow wheat for the bun and plant tomatoes, lettuce and onions to finish it off.
• You’d have to get milk from the cow so that you could produce the butter that would go into making the bun. You’d also need to slaughter it for its rennet to make cheese, and, of course, you’d need the meat for the burger itself. You’d probably need multiple cows and several acres of land.
• Tomatoes can only be harvested in the summer, and lettuce in the spring. Mammals are normally slaughtered in the winter.
• Not only would all of this be prohibitively expensive, it would take over a year to put all the parts together. A century ago something like the Cheeseburger would be unthinkable.

Source: Waldo Jaquith