No longer is it all about greasy deep-fried chicken wings, drive-through production-line hamburgers and bright orange fizzy drinks.
Stopping Pulp Fiction from being made would have saved me a lot of personal strife – especially all the strife I encountered studying film at university during its relative afterglow, where people would pad out their hokey three-minute plots with swaths and swaths of tedious babble about continental hamburgers and the imagined subtexts hidden within Achy Breaky Heart.
But the bigger opportunities may lie in newer markets.Americans still slather ketchup on hamburgers but their habits are changing.
This argues that an exchange rate between two currencies is in equilibrium (ie. at PPP) when it equates the prices of a basket of goods and services in both countries or, in this case, that rate of exchange which leaves hamburgers costing the same in each country.
But a bigger short-term threat for peddlers of hamburgers, pizzas and fried chicken comes from customers still watching their waist-lines.Same-store sales at fast-food chains such as McDonald's and Burger King are declining, and a new business dubbed "fast casual" has sprung up.
There is the disgraced Hudson Foods of Arkansas, which distributed 5m hamburgers that may have been contaminated with E. coli 0157 H7, the bacterium-villain, and which had already been responsible in 1995 for America's largest-ever meat recall.And then there may in time be yet another victim too.
When McDonald's opened in Tokyo in 1971, its chief executive declared, "If we eat hamburgers and potatoes for 1,000 years, we will become taller, our skin will become whiter and our hair blonder".
Health scares about hamburgers go back to the era of the St Louis Exposition, but the hamburger has always counter-attacked.
"But I can't make music like hamburgers".
She learns that the Chinese believe that westerners regard them as lazy a conclusion that is reinforced, no doubt, by the fact that her American boss shouts and throws hamburgers at her Chinese staff.
In 1993, an outbreak of E.coli O157 H7 in hamburgers killed four children and made hundreds ill in Washington state.
