On this season, we'll explore our most ingrained beliefs, delusions, and archetypes, the ways that cognitive dissonance shapes our culture and how our reality is created by the stories we tell.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

So what are they saying? We're going to ban hamburgers, and Americans are never going to have a barbecue and flip a hamburger again.

They want to take away your hamburgers.

No more steak. I guess government forced veganism is in order.

I love cooking on the grill because that's what makes me a real man, among other awesome things.

On a camping trip in Washington State in my early 20s, I caught a shimmering rainbow trout,

something I'd done all through my childhood.

I cleaned it the way I was taught, saw its bright blood on the knife, all its complicated

insides, its little red heart that looked like a small polished stone.

I was pretty excited to present this dinner, to share this hard-won bounty with anyone who wanted

it skillfully cooked and tinfoil over the campfire. But when I returned, to my surprise, many of the campers in our large

group were shocked at my callousness, telling me that they themselves could never kill a living

thing like I did. But at the same time, an orange-red liquid was dripping down everyone's lips, the messy ground

hamburger meat of a sloppy Joe.

When I attempted to point out this irony that they were eating meat that had suffered

a great deal more than the fish I was holding, even though they didn't have to see it, a

man said to the group with a hearty laugh, that's the beauty of

America. There are few things more quintessentially American than a hearty dad prodding a flat

circle of ground beef with a spatula, sweating under a baseball cap in the early July sun. Other men lean over

the sizzling burgers, studying them like an ancient text, offering their interpretations of when

they must be flipped. It's the one and only time that a lot of men will cook the entire year, practicing their dominion

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