Who Cares What’s In It?
There’s a variation of an old expression that two things no American wants to observe being made are laws and hot dogs (sausages work here as well). But unlike most laws which one or more subgroups inevitably wind up despising or resenting, virtually every American loves the hot dog.
And one man hugely responsible for this is Nathan Handwerker, a New Yorker who opened a small hot dog stand at New York’s Coney Island.
Circa 1916 Handwerker worked for a time at Feltman’s also on Coney Island selling dogs at ten cents. But overcome with entrepreneurial fervor he launched his own stand. His marketing strategy was to undercut his former employer by selling dogs at five cents apiece.
First pivotal moment: the public balked at the cheaper hot dog. Upton Sinclair’s infamous “The Jungle”, a gritty and unflattering look at the horrors of the meat packing industry had made people a bit skittish about using cheaper ingredients. So Handwerker enlisted doctors from the locals hospitals. He gave them free hot dogs as long as they wore their white doctor “uniforms” to Nathan’s. The strategy worked. People saw doctors eating the cheaper hot dogs and inferred that they were safe. And Nathan’s Famous Dogs took off. To this day, you would not actually want to see the multicolored goop that winds up as a hot dog, but it’s the cooked product that counts. That’s why there’s no hot dog sushi or tartar.
Nathan’s was also at least partially responsible for the famous exercise in overt gluttony and excess known as the 4th of July hot dog eating contest. Japan’s Takeru Kobayashi, a 132-lb hot-dog-eating-machine obliterated all existing records by stuffing 69 dogs and rolls into his slim body in ten minutes, a feat matched by American Joey Chestnutt. The disclaimer “DON’T ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME” should be aired before the show, but Nathan’s now sells in excess of 450,000,000 dogs each year, aided largely by stunts like the contest, of course baseball games, and the legitimization and popularization of American street and trailer food.
What’s amazing is that in our zeal for the hot dog, we’ve accepted “paste-like and batter-like meat and poultry products produced by forcing bones, with edible tissue attached, through a sieve or similar device under high pressure.” The list of other ingredients like sodium phosphate or potassium lactate and some that are virtually unpronounceable to the lay person is generally ignored by hot dog fans. I can still recall the unpleasant sights from a Boy Scout trip to a local hot dog plant in New Haven to this day. And yet I continue to gleefully eat hot dogs, like most of us. The hot dog is the ultimate culinary conundrum. Ain’t America great?
