If you know how to cook ground beef, you can serve up a healthy one-dish meal any day of the week. Ground beef became popular as a way to make scraps of fatty beef salable. Originally the meat was chopped finely or minced, but by 1902 butchers were simply running it through the meat grinder twice along with spices and onion, and selling the resulting ground beef as "hamburger." Today ground beef is used in all sorts of dishes, from meatloaf to tacos, and Americans consume approximately 13 billion hamburgers a year.