Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Hot Dogs

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why hot dogs are secretly incredibly fascinating. (Plus, a special message from Robert Brockway and Seanbaby, who founded 1900HOTDOG.com)Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Hot dogs, known for being sausages, famous for being in a bun and cheap, baseball. Nobody thinks much about them. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why hot dogs are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, so below pods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt.

I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of hot dogs? Well, I used to eat hot dogs quite a bit as a youngster. And I ate them in an odd way. I used to eat them hamburger style.

So you know how like hot dog, it's usually like perpendicular to the plane of your mouth. Yeah. Oh, that's a very good way to put it. Yeah. Yeah. I used to eat it parallel. So kind of like a typewriter, I would eat it and take little nibbles. Like corn. Like corn. Exactly. Thanks. You understand. Okay. And people would gently tell me, and I was like a little kid, you know, like five or six. And they would say like, hey, you're eating that hot dog a little strangely. I'd be like, I know. I know it. Mind your own business.

Why don't you mind your own hot dog business and leave me to my hot dog ways? Correct. Thank you. So, you know, I marched to the beat of my own dog. That was hot. So that's my, that's my relationship to hot dogs. Nice. Yeah. And now I kind of am a little bit of a hot dog snob.

I can't do it if the bun is not toasty. and if the dog is just boiled, that's just not going to work for me. Same, yeah. Like a tepid bun that's just sort of a little soggy and a dog that's just been boiled. You know, not doing it for me. It's not my thing. So a little bit of a snob when it comes to the hot dogs. I don't eat them very often anymore.

Last time I had a good dog was in Copenhagen at a Christmas market. So that's good. Yeah, and it turns out this topic. I always thought, oh, it's an American thing, and then we spread it worldwide. Like, we've only sort of spread it worldwide. It's still very U.S. and maybe Canada. Right. It's a very U.S. thing in a way we'll talk about.

Yeah, I mean, I think what I had was technically like a Bratworth or something. I don't know. They didn't call it a hot dog. I called a hot dog. And if I get my way, everyone will just call them hot dogs because you know, Bratworth, whatever you want to say is, you know, it's too fancy. That gets into my relationship, which is Bratwurst, I have a much bigger emotional pull and draw to.

Really? My dad loved them. And it's really one of the only German-American things. Like, we just weren't very German growing up, but that was one of our big things. So like, hot dogs, I was like, well, it's not a Bratwurst, but it's fine. And then also I love the hot dogs at Portillo's because I'm a child of the Chicago suburbs. And Portillo's is the big chain there. We have wonderful buddies, Sean Baby and Robert Rockway started a website called 1-900 Hot Dog.

Oh, yeah. Which is a comedy website. I will play a special message from them in the outro. It's going to be fun. Ooh, exciting. Because I asked them the relationship to hot dogs. But as a joke, because the website has nothing to do with hot dogs, my first article for them was about Portillo's and about how I thought. the website was about hot dogs, you know.

So that's fun. I love that. That was for a bit. You weren't actually thinking the website was about hot dogs. It was a bit, right, Alex? Right? That wasn't a genuine goof on your part. Yeah, especially because 1,900 hot dog is not a functional phone number.

It's not enough characters, you know. Oh, now you tell me. You've been calling it internationally. Who the heck have I been talking to? So, yeah, so like those things are my entire relationship. And also shout out to our recent guest, Jamie Loftus, her amazing book called Raw Dog from 23 is one source this week. Awesome.

She's done so much hot dog stuff. I felt like it'd be more fun to do a new topic with her. So we did pressed pennies recently. You can hear her there. That was fun. She is great. Yeah, she's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to learn about them. I'm also excited to learn because, like, When I think of Brought Worst, I just think of a fancier hot dog. Like a sort of fancy, somewhat curly and bigger hot dog. But I'm sure there's some actual differences that I don't understand. So yeah, I'm excited to learn. Oddly, there's enough of a difference Bratwurst could be a whole different episode.

So we're really going to do it. Okay. We're not having a hot, a Brat summer. Yeah, in New York, you don't find a ton of Browse, so I'm kind of deprived. Aw, I'm sorry. It's fine. Don't worry about me. I'm okay.

I am, actually. The more you say it, I'm the worried er I am. Yeah, and we'll mainly talk about, like, hot dogs as this specific kind of sausage that is both uniform and American and also part of the broader sausage tradition. It's wild. It's great. Mm-hmm. All right. Let's do it.

And thank you to a lot of folks on the Discord, especially Donna and Court Jester, for suggesting this. And also thank you to a listener on our Discord for suggesting the next thing here, because on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, When you siph upon a pod, numbers are different where you are. Any stat your heart desires will come to you. If you've numbers in your dreams, there's no stat that's too extreme when you siph upon a pod like syphalopods do. Beautiful.

It made me think of a little hot dog boy who's like made out of hot dogs and every time he tells a lie, his hot dog nose gets longer. I guess I have more hot dog connections because there's a little stand that was in the Union Station, train station, Chicago. It's called Gold Coast Dogs. Gold Coast is a name for a North Shore neighborhood that's very, very nice in Chicago. So then their logo was like a little hot dog who's incredibly fancy with a top hat and a monocle and stuff. Oh, I'm looking at, he's also got a fancy hot dog lady. They look like they're from the great Gadsby, but hot dogs. Precisely. Yeah, it's a couple. Now I'm thinking of them being the Gimney Cricket hot dog. Yeah, yeah. The fanciness of this logo reminds me that I've also heard Frankfurter and I don't know I don't know what the difference is between

hot dogs Frankfurters Broughtwursts etc we'll basically skim it like in the u.s our creation of hot dog culture just merged all of those things into being one thing but they were actually different in especially Germany and Austria right yeah yeah it's weird and and thank you to serial thron for that song that sent us into a reverie of hot dog characters we have a new name for this segment every week, please make a massillion whack-in' as possible. submit through Discord or to siphpot at gmail.com. And the first number gets us right into the old

country there. It's the year 1432 AD. The 1400s, 1432. That's the earliest record we've found of a written rule about sausage making. 1432, someone wrote down

what had to go into a kind of sausage. I see. Okay. And more than a rest of be like a, hey, locally, if you want to call it this, you need to do this kind of thing. Oh, okay. So it's like a hot dog accredation or like a licensing hot dog license from, what did you say, 1482? 1432, yeah. 1432. Okay.

Yeah, exactly. And the key source for this whole episode is another book. It's a history book called Hot Dog a Global History. It's by Bruce Craig, who's Emeritus Professor of History at Roosevelt University, which happens to be in Chicago. This is a big Chicago episode. But he said, you know, we may discover an older regulation as we go through records, but in 2007, a group of researchers found a 1432 local law for what goes into Thuringer Roast Bratwurst. And Thuringer Roast Bratwurst, that's one German sausage type. It was named for Thuringia, a region, and that's now central Germany. But by, by. law in that area, if you wanted to call it Thuringer Roast Bratwurst, it had to be made entirely out

of pork, no other animals, and it also had to be cooked and eaten the same day it was made. I see, okay. Yeah, that's pretty nice, actually. Think about it. Like, you don't want a stinky dog sitting around in dog water all day. Yes. Yeah, and Bruce Craig points out that this was similar to laws about a Bavarian kind of sausage called vice versa. And, you know, in general, there's a weird flip when Americans started making hot dogs where it was one of the first times sausages were a casual and easy food to make. Like food mechanization meant, oh, you just chop a bunch of meat into a slurry and there you go. But before that, sausage making is so laborious. Like it's so much just physical hacking at the flesh of the animal and stuffing into the casing and on and on and on.

And like, it made sense for preserving meats and making use of all the parts of an animal. But it only got easy once American-style hot dogs happened. Was that before you even had like the meat grinder thing where you had a metal machine where you'd put the meat in and then use a hand crank to grind the meat and make the sausage? Yeah. Some of the, I guess maybe we'll talk about that. but like the earliest version, you'd just like take a pair of knives and mince the meat really finely? Yes. Before industrialization, maybe people made meat grinders, but you needed to machine the parts very accurately to get anything good out of it that's incredibly hard to clean.

Like, it's really taken until the 1800s for any sausage or hot dog you ever see to be easy to make. It's actually like a really noble tradition of intense human labor before that. Have you ever been to like a Mo place or bow place? It's sort of like a street food place and it's like they do the thing with the knives with the meat. It's not so bad because then they don't have to like stuff it in a sausage casing. It goes in like a little sandwich, but that really fine mincing. And it looks difficult. Like I would probably get some of my fingers in that and you'd be eating kicking.

lady fingers as well. That's not totally appetizing. Well, you know, everyone's a critic. Gordon Ramsey over here thinks he's too good. Yeah, and we'll talk about across all of sausage history, there was questions about what's in it. Like, oh, no, have other animals or parts of the human ended up there? Because you've transformed it from an identifiable part of an animal like a drumstick or a steak into sort of like a tube.

Yeah, and this goes back way further than I expected. Bruce Craig says our vague archaeological estimate is that humans started making sausages 20,000 years ago. So they're older than civilization. And hot dogs are just a tiny subcategory from about the last 200. years. Like basically shoving meat parts into maybe like intestines. Is that the idea? Yeah, intestines especially. You can use other skin parts, but yeah. Yeah. Cool. I mean, it kind of, in a gross way, it kind of makes sense, right? You're like, you're carving up a, say, a boar, and you're like, here's all this bore meat. And look, it comes with its own little, like, meat tube that I can put the boar meat in.

Yeah. And there's already a bunch of fat probably that is around. And then the fat helps preserve it. And then you find it doesn't go bad as fast when you have it covered in the fat. So yeah, I guess that's a pretty natural, you know, progression of ideas, of sick and twisted ideas. Yeah, I just like between the labor and the, I guess, honoring of the animal, because you've killed the animal, but you're using as. much of it as possible. I find this very honorable and cool until maybe super recent hot dog times. Yeah, and then some of those other names for them, like Frankfurter apparently refers to the German

city of Frankfurt, but we think the style of sausage was not quite local to there. It just got named for it. Also, Wiener is sort of an anglicization of words relating to the city of Vienna, because that's a major city in Austria that had a bunch of sausage. traditions going on too. So we'll talk about the name hot dog coming along later. But in a U.S. context, those are basically all the same things. Yeah. Okay. Like in Vienna, they were known for veal, especially being part of their sausages. So like if you're talking about a vener sausage, that would mean something specific in the past or in Europe, but not, not now. Vener. Yeah, the German pronunciation, like it's even sometimes, I think,

written with a W is the first letter of Vienna instead of a V. So it's, that's kind of where it comes from. It's not Wiener, isn't it? It looks a little bit like a weiner. It's Vienna. It comes from Vienna. Apparently that joke is very old and American tradition too. Yeah. Because we made fun of the German word. Take that. And yeah, the next number, this fits what you're talking about with fat going in there and stuff. The number is about 50%, about half. That's how much of an ordinary hot dog is fats and water. The rest is meat pretty much. But the first step in a basic hot dog, a grocery store hot dog that is not a fancy

one is to grind meat, usually pork trimmings or both pork and poultry. And then you add a lot of water so you can turn that into a slurry, like an emulsion of meat to make it the lighter texture we're used to. Emulsion. Yeah. Sounds good. Sounds appetizing. And then our next few numbers are a couple of essentially potential birthdays of the hot dog. Like when did the American-style hot dog begin?

One way of thinking about it is the 1820s 200 years ago. That's when Americans patented a better meat chopping machine with blades going up and down. Okay. And apparently we rapidly improved that. By the year 1868, we found a way to make it steaming. Powered. Before that, it was a hand crank starting in the 1820s. The hand crank I recognized from old cartoons of people making sausages and then like a cartoon character falling into the sausage machine and then getting made into sausage but like still

being sentient, which is kind of like a wild thing, right? Where it's like you're still you and you're still running around. You're just now a bunch of sausage links. It's probably the least exaggerated itchy and scratchy, but they would just do that to Tom and to Jerry. It's not a different thing. Yeah. A lot of those old cartoons are pretty, they may not have shown blood exactly, but they were gruesome. Yeah, yeah. And so in a lot of ways, 1868, when we began steampowering this and enormously increased production that way, that's kind of one potential birthday of hot dogs, 1868.

Okay. And then the other big idea is the decade of the 1920s, so about 100 years ago. That is when a Chicago area hot dog manufacturer named Irwin Oscar Freunds, he funded an entire research fellowship at what's now Carnegie Mellon University for his own purposes. Like he paid for at least one person to have like a full-time learning and doing research at this great university. but he wanted them to find an artificial substitute for hot dog casings. Hmm. Instead of real intestines or skin or other stuff. Okay, right.

And why did he want the artificial one just to it would be easier to mass produce? Yes, and in two ways. Yeah. Because for one thing, like folks like Jamie Loftus have written about, you know, if you're a hot dog connoisseur, one thing you're looking for is a nice snap when you bite into the hot dog. You don't want it to be like you're chewing on a water balloon filled with meat. Right. That's the thing I do at a different hobby on my own time.

Yeah. That's separate. That's separate. All the questions are answered by my shirt that says it's meatball time. People are like, surely she means the normal meaning of meatball. And you're like, I got to put on another shirt. shirt. I got to explain this. Right. So yeah, and until the 1920s, every sausage and hot dog, they had to pretty laboriously put on real animal parts as the casing. That was a big bottleneck

in production. But Erwin Freund funded people to invent a new approach for him, which partly led to other ways we could do an edible casing that's not straight from the animal. But the main thing led to is skinless hot dogs. Hmm. And skinless is the basic grocery store hot dog in most ways where you don't have a big snap. The initial one was made of purified cotton cellulose. What you do is you fill that with meat batter, cook and smoke it, and then strip off

the casing. Okay. I mean, like there's sausages like that, right? Where you have a casing that is not meant to be eaten? I think so, yeah. Or yeah, there's like salami definitely like that where it's like a you don't, the casing is like a papery thing that you take off. Yeah. And so if you've ever had that that's like the other end is it's so thick you can't really eat it easily.

And then with these skinless hot dogs, if you've ever had a hot dog with no snap at all where it's just sort of squishy, that's something we invented in the 1920s. And that massively increased production because now. really just put the meat slurry into temporary tubes. That's it. I don't like that, Alex. That's... I just never quite thought about the difference between a premium portillo's hot dog that's really snappy and then this different thing. Oh yeah.

And also the Vienna beef company in Chicago is ironic because Vieners from Vienna were usually not made of beef. And then the all beef hot dogs of Vienna beef are named for that. Anyway, it's... There's a lot of variety in how premium or not premium a hot dog is. But if you've had the one with no snap, it's usually from a gigantic assembly line that will link a video of one example of. It's from the Science Channel. They have just video of huge, endless linked together lines of artificial casing that also have a big stripe on them, like a big black stripe in this case. But that makes it easy for factory workers to see if the little knife machine has cut off.

the artificial casing yet. Right, right. You know what this reminds me of? There was a video in the early days of YouTube of hot dogs being made, and someone just took out the regular audio and overlaid them sort of voiceovering. The hot dogs being made sounds like. And it was very good. It was really good.

I encourage you to watch it. if we can find that. But yeah, that was back in the good old days before AI videos with fruit-headed people having affairs and stuff. We had just human beings taking videos of factories making hot dogs and then like making gross mouth sounds over it. that, you know, I yearn for those days. Right. It's like before we mechanized hot dogs. Yeah.

It's like the artisanal sausage of... It's artisanal, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And also, if you ever get grocery store hot dogs and you see sort of a thin, faint line down the side of each one, that's a trace result of the casing peeling machine. Hmm. Okay.

So then you know you've had a mechanized hot dog. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this made especially Erwin Freunde, fantastically wealthy. His former estate is now a gigantic national laboratory called Argonne National Laboratory in the Chicago area. Like this was the other truly revolutionary thing for cranking out American hot dogs. So either 1868 or the 1920s is the true start of this food. Okay. All right.

Yeah, that makes sense. because that's when we were sort of, we were beginning to mechanize. Right. They're both like industrial or modern science tech industry kind of dates. Right, right. I said that so clearly and cleanly. Anyway. Hey.

Sounded good to me. And then there are a few more ingredients besides meat, fat, and water in a casing or temporarily in a casing. There's almost always some spices just mixed right in, especially garlic. powder, black pepper, white pepper. And then there's almost always preservatives at minimum regular salt. Right. And, you know, from ancient sausages to modern hot dogs, there's salt mixed right into the meat. Right.

Because otherwise it's going to, it's not going to remain edible. Yeah. Yeah. It's the good sense of preservatives, even if it's the bad sense, too. Like it preserves the food. It makes it last. Right, right. And apparently hot dog production in those late 1800s and 1900s, they really, really sped up a whole other part of sausage making, which is the curing and finishing process.

Like old-timey sausage could take up to 30 days of brining and curing and becoming more preserved. But hot dogs get cured and finished within a few hours. Wow. Okay. The main reason is extra preservatives. and they usually use a chemical salt such as sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate. And those oxidize in the hot dogs to form nitrites. Ah, yes, I've heard of those. Those are really good for you, right?

Yeah, allegedly they're bad for you and I believe it, but this is one of the many ways we're not doctors. So, you know, it just seems, yeah. You know, I'm a doctor of hugs. Yeah, and this has led to some very negative but also very, very, mythical claims about what's in hot dogs. And I'm talking about like the most modern kind where it is regulated by relatively progressive normal governments and stuff. We basically have one really negative true claim about hot dogs and one really negative false claim about hot dogs here. Like there's so many concerns about the healthiness of hot dogs. There's both things to watch out

for and not. The true one, the number is 2015. That is when the United Nations World Health Organization announced that many processed meats, including hot dogs, cause cancer. They rated it as group one of their carcinogens, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Group one means their confidence that it's a carcinogen, not like that it's the most carcinogenic. Right. But Ars Technica says it was a panel of dozens of global experts reviewing more than 800

studies. They said there simply seems to be proof that processed meat. In particular stuff like hot dogs where there's so much processing, raise your chances of colorectal cancer and also stomach cancer. Right. So, you know, we're not doctors, but those doctors say they give you cancer. That's not good. Yeah, we're just pointing to what the doctors say.

And I'm sure it's a, I'm sure it's the dose makes the poison sort of deal. Like, don't panic because you've had some hot dogs. Oh, yeah, and I'm going to keep eating them from time to time. the way. Yeah. Right. Like, it's just like if you eat them daily, you might want to talk to your doctor about it. Exactly. And then also, because they're real concerns about hot dogs, people have spun up some bonkers myths about them and the health. And the most bonkers myth is wonderfully debunked by the McGill University Office for Science and Society. They're always great source linking them. There's a myth about a common curing agent in hot dogs, because

they'll put a few extra chemicals into the mix to make it cure faster. And one common one is called sodium erythorbate. Sodium erythorbate. Apparently it's a form of vitamin C. It's fine for us to eat it. But there's a truly nuts internet myth where people heard the word erythorbate and decided that sounds like earthworm bait. Oh.

And claimed there are earthworms and hot dogs. That's simply made up and a word sounding like a word. It's nothing at all. You're like, well, hot dog before pre-cooked hot dog is pink. Earthworms is pink. So. That too. You know.

Yeah. That's all there is. They really don't let companies put earthworms and hot dogs or do it on purpose. I mean, but also think of like how, like, why, you know? Because I don't think. Right. It'd be that easy to do. It's laborious to go get worms.

I don't know if you've fished folks, but yeah, it's not easy. I guess they could have like a giant earthworm farm, but that would be pretty noticeable. Exactly, yeah. So there's like real concerns about these and then people get super paranoid too and make up extra ones. It's weird. If you're worried about bugs in processed food, you're most, I'm sorry to say you're most likely to get bugs in where they're like a curious little beetle or a weevil is in a hot dog factory gets too close to the grinderator and becomes part of a hot dog like that might happen sometimes yeah especially since 1868 when we steam powered it yeah

nobody's watching really so yeah yeah i mean but it's not uh not hot dog specifically just in general uh processed foods you'll get you might get some buggos in there but listen everything's yeah Everything's from the earth. Bugs are mostly fine. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Yeah. We're no longer living in Upton Sinclair's, you know, the jungle.

Yeah, that has changed somewhat. Yes. And Jamie Loftus writes about it brilliantly. Again, Raw Dog is her book. Right. But one last health concern with hot dogs, there's a really fascinating thing where U.S. regulators removed a whole category of carcinogens in a way that kind of have changed all of hot dog culture.

They eliminated what used to be called red hots. Hmm. And like the name red hot is still around, but it's become like Frankfurter and Weiner where it doesn't really mean anything anymore. It's just slang for a hot dog. Hmm. I've never heard the reference to a hot dog. I've heard them for the little candies, red hots.

Yeah, apparently it's more common in the southeast of the U.S. Okay. And I've only seen it very rarely and partly one. when I lived in Durham, North Carolina. Yeah. Well, I'm from the southeast. It rhymes, so you should know it. Between that and the Earthrim thing, it's just all a hominem show now.

That's it. Not hominemes, but rhymes. Yeah. We've been reading a lot of Dr. Seuss to our respective babies. Hop on pop. Yep. It's all a rhyming show now. So Red Hot, that used to be an entire second lower tier.

of hot dog. For a lot of U.S. hot dog history, you could go to a hot dog stand and they might offer hot dogs and red huts. Okay. And hot dog was better. It's made with relatively standard animal parts, potentially even only from one kind of animal. This is becoming increasingly menacing, but go on. Yep. And then a red hot, the deal was, hey, this is cheaper. We are kind of telling you up front it's going to be made with many kinds of animal parts. And we're going to dye at the brightest red we can with like a lot of red food dye. Why? Why would they do that?

A few reasons. It was to disguise anything weird visually and also to like catch your eye, like a fast food sign or something, you know? Like, hey, look. But apparently this was like so cartoonishly red. You know, people would take a bite and a bunch of red dye would drip out and stain their clothes. really get it out kind of thing, you know? Oh, that's awful. I hate that.

God. And for better or worse, in like the mid-1900s, there were scientific studies suggesting maybe some red dies are carcinogens. And this was not a hot dog specific field of science. So it's like you already have the hot dog itself having carcinogenic properties and you add in more. Right. so that it can be got, but there was like a whole era of like dyeing things red to try to make them more appealing like they did that to pistachios, right?

Yes. Yeah, yeah, we dove into that on the pistachios episode. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was so shocked that hot dogs had a thing like this too. I had no idea. Weren't Boston baked beans read at like?

Yeah. What was up with that? Americans were like, just make the weird food red. Yeah. And then Iranians were like, pistachios are not weird. And Americans were like, I don't care. But yeah, with hot dogs, they did this too. Right.

It's like, I can't stand looking at a green nut or meat-colored meat. It has to be bright red. Everything has to be bright, bright, bright, bright, red. Yeah, just make it like St. Louis Cardinals' colors. Thank you. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, also candied apples.

Yeah, yeah. Before we had caramel apples that were, are a, a disgusting golden brown color. We had delicious, extremely red candy colored candy apples. In the mid-1900s, the government started to say, okay, these red dyes are safe. These red dyes might be carcinogens. We don't really know for sure, but let's just take them out of the food supply. And the upshot is that helped end the red hot era of like a low-grade bright red hot dog. And so now that name is just kind of merged into the other names for hot dogs. It doesn't mean much.

I'm looking at pictures of these. These are the most unappetizing things. I'm already like for me, it's all or nothing for the hot dogs. Like it's either got to be quite good or I'm uninterested because then you've got sort of a soggy bun and like a floppy pink wiener. And that's not doing it at all for me. This like this is just, it's so they look like a cartoon guy. And I don't like that very much. No, thank you.

Yeah, I think we're like born after the era when anyone ate this, really. Right. And back then people were either like, it's cheaper or they actively sought it out. It was extra salty and everything else and they liked it. Yeah. Yeah, remember ketchup that came in fun colors? My mom wouldn't let us get it. Yeah.

My mom didn't have that problem because I, I think, first of all, I didn't really like ketchup. And also, I looked at those and, you know, had like a small panic attack every time I would see those in the grocery store. Sure. Yeah, yeah. It's just like, it's not supposed to be green. Speaking of the grocery store, there's one other thing people kind of demand to know about hot dogs and whether, you know, the contents are scamming us or in some other way we're getting scammed. And our next takeaway is takeaway number one.

One Canadian marketing stunt indicates that the different amounts of hot dogs in packages and hot dog buns in packages is probably the scam we all think it is. Okay. If you try to dig up any official word on why, for example, there's often 10 hot dogs in a package, eight hot dog buns in a package, and then you're kind of stuck. It's kind of fake. It seems to really be the scam where they just want us to buy more food than we need. I see. Okay. And one event in Canada indicates that they could just change it anytime.

Oh, okay. It's not like some kind of like the hot dogs have to be pair bonded with other hot dogs. Otherwise they get distressed. Like what's... Per bonded. The hot dog accelerator will. explode if we don't properly set this up. Yeah, there'll be a black hole. Honestly, I was not even aware that this was like the idea that like you need a certain

number of hot dogs per package. I remember this from being a kid, but also I feel like comedy, especially in the 1990s, there would be just so many hack little complaints about the world. And one of them is that why are hot dogs and hot dog buns not in the same amounts in the packages? Right. As a person, I'm, but I also experienced it. in real life. Like, they didn't make that up, you know. Right. Okay.

Well, you know, one might say that this is made specifically to target people who have OCD like I do. Right. Like, I remember doing a lot of putting the last two hot dogs in bread. And that's just the bun because we didn't want to like keep purchasing or our grocery store trips didn't align with solving this, you know. Right. And the closest thing you can get to a straight answer about why they're sold that way, the source is a group called the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council,

the U.S. trade industry group. It sounds made up, but that's just what it's called. It does. It sounds like an evil made-up organization. Yeah. And by the way, key sources here are CBC Radio, NPR, and then a couple stories from Reader's Digest and from Mental Floss that I feel are too credulous about what the hot dog people are telling them.

Because here's how mental floss takes what the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council says. They say there's simply no way to avoid hot dogs being in packs of 10 and buns being in packs of 8. We simply can't avoid it. And it's because of different production processes for each item. They claim that meat is usually packaged in bulk a pound at a time. And the average hot dog weighs 1.6 ounces. so you simply must put 10 hot dogs in a package to reach one pound. That doesn't make any sense even a little bit, to be honest with you.

Like, what do you mean it has to be a pound of meat in order for what makes it magical? Every grocery store will sell you different amounts than one pound of all of their meats. No, of course. The dogs don't need to be 1.6 ounces. They're acting like these are laws of the universe or something. No, no, it's like it's not physics. It's not like each hot dog is like an atomic particle for which there are very specific rules of cohesion. Yes.

And then the other part is 10 dogs would be fine if you could buy 10 buns. Sure, great. But the claim is that for some reason, the bakers of hot dog buns have like never spoken to or dealt with the hot dog people, I guess. I mean ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous. Right. That on its own, I don't believe. And then they say that the real problem is the trays that are used to run the buns through an oven and bake them. The trays are set up to produce sets of four buns. And so therefore you can only package the hot dog buns in multiples of four. And that's it. There's just like no way to fix any of that is the claim. Then do 12 buns per package. So you have two oopsie buns. And I think I have seen 12 in a package, but that's still not a helpful number, really.

Well, I can put them, pretend I'm wearing earmuffs made out of hot dog buns without ruining anyone's food. So it just sounds like you don't have an expansive mindset about this. But okay, so we can't, the idea is that there's like, in no way can these companies like, not do this very annoying thing where you have they don't align you're not in alignment yeah and like everything we just described before about how hot dogs are made it's such a mechanized industrialized controlled system like we're skipping even further details of it and so then for them to just say well there's no way we could simply put these two things together especially given that there's food conglomerates that own businesses making both things, you know? Like, it just, it's just

obviously false to me. Yeah, of course. No, no, obviously. Like, it's, there's no way. But mental floss is like, well, that's how it works. So I, this is like, I continue to not trust them very much as a source. Right. Yeah. No. I mean, it, I mean, first of all, you don't use floss mentally. Dentally. So that's their first mistake. And, yeah, no, I don't buy that at all. I add this to my conspiracy theory board that it's a conspiracy. I really thought there would be a more interesting answer about why that thing happens. And they're just ripping you off like you think as far as I can tell.

And then the biggest indicator of this is 2022 in Canada. There was a marketing stunt where they just fixed it in order to get a bunch of free press. Okay. In 2022, it was Kraft Heinz, which among many brands owns Oscar Meyer, the giant hot dog company. Right. So Craft Heinz, Canada, they basically did the language and pantomime of what would be a grassroots petition movements. But it's all corporate and it's gross to me, you know? And so they branded it as a Heinz Catchup Canada petition to like, help.

the, you know, consumer and, like, finally make hot dogs and hot dog buns be the same amounts. You were the ones you can just do that. Yes. Allegedly this got 30,000 online signatures, which is also not that many, but the actual stuff I can find about the petition is just further social media posts from other brands. Like, Hellman's mayonnaise piped up to say, we also think this is a good idea and sign it. Like, that kind of thing, you know. It's just all on a calendar in a social media marketing office. Just let me float in a giant bat of hot dog water into the abyss.

Oh, I hate the brand, like when the brands are talking on social media and. Right. It's the brands talking. I hate it so much. After they got major national coverage in Canada on the U.S. for free, it's free advertising. Then Heinz announced, oh, our petition works, even though that's fake. This was just all schedule and planned. Wonder baking, it's weirdly separate from Wonderbread in the U.S., but it's similar. Wonderbaking in Canada sold 10 packs of hot dog buns in some Canadian grocery stores, like briefly in 2022.

as far as I can find they let this lapse and just return the situation to what it was before. But they said at last 10 hot dog buns to go with 10 hot dogs, your petition of the people, blah, blah, blah. It's fake. It's not true. They could have also just unilaterally sold them in packages of eight hot dogs and made them cost less. Yes. This is one of those truly deeply fake problems that is, just being inflicted on us as like the population.

Yeah. We live in Hellman's delicious mustard. Ha ha ha. I got them. More of a mayonnaise brand, but they probably make everything yet. They make mustard. I'm looking at this

fact checkable. Hellman's mustard. They so do, Alex. Ha ha. Yes. Helmonds does make mustard, so I was correct about that. I got to keep writing that high. Yeah, and I'm just so fixated on hot dogs and hot dog buns are not matching numbers in the packages for exactly the dumb reason where we're getting ripped off. Like, I really thought it would be, I find it so sift that it's not siff, you know?

Like, it's just we're getting robbed and a Canadian stunt proved it. they should punish those companies for those like stunts and have an actual investigation like i don't know what the uh canadian equivalent is of like the uh fc or uh consumer protection agency which i guess we don't have in the u.s anymore i haven't been keeping up uh with that but i assume now it's all just like a free for all but maybe in canada they still have that and they should investigate this because I think it is a big scandal and the entire Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile should be put in prison. No cell can hold them. Right.

They'll blow through. Yeah. And folks, that's so much of where hot dogs come from and how they work, especially a trick being played on us. We're going to take a quick break, then come back with much grander hot dog scandals, honestly. It gets more scandalous from here. Yeah. Folks, we're back. Hi.

And we have grander hot dog scandals for you. Maybe the darkest is takeaway number two. The name hot dog comes from racist mockery of Germans. Oh, like I, oh. The main, main origin of it is that racists in the U.S. joked about poor immigrant Germans eating dogs. and dogs going into the sausages. Okay.

That's kind of the big big start. So if you're wondering, hey, is this like, it's the world that we live in today, like, is this a new, a fresh hell? No. No, it's a stale hell. It's a hell that we have been in many times over and over again. Yeah, like from mainstream comedy movies, especially in the 90s, to like the current president and vice president of the U.S.

There's been jokes around me and culture about other ethnic groups in the U.S. eating dogs. And it turns out they just did that with Germans first. Yeah. Like back when Germans were not considered white, you know? Right. See, this is the thing. Once you get included in the sort of like whiteness group,

then suddenly no one's accusing you of eating cats and dogs. Exactly. Yeah. Then they just kind of cut it out. Right. If people can't tell from my last name Schmidt, I'm German-American, this really jumped out to me, not knowing this before. Right. And Alex only eats dogs, not because he's German, but because he's is a large coyote. This morning, I hit my head really, really hard on a little wooden bookshelf that we set up for Baby Schmidt.

And I was talking about how I was going to get a wily coyote lump on my head. Oh yeah, with the little birdies, little roadrunners racing around your head. Yeah, yeah, I really feel like a big coyote today. Keep your doggies safe from coyotes, everyone, because those are the... Coyotes really do eat dogs, yeah, yeah. They really do eat, especially small dogs, but that's normal for them, and it's not their fault. One of the positive things to learn about here is just the history of German migration to the United States. We don't really think about it today because Germans have gotten

folded into the made-up concept of whiteness. But key sources, Bruce Craig's amazing book, Hot Dog, the Global History, also a piece for Smithsonian Magazine and resources from the Library at Congress. The second half of the 1800s in the U.S. was defined by, well, the Civil War and reconstruction, and also mostly Germans moving here, additionally Irish folks. Yeah. In 1848, a lot of different parts of what's now a unified Germany. They were little kingdoms and noble duchies and stuff. And in 1848, especially a lot of revolutions happened to try to achieve democracy. They were all crushed. And then a lot of those people had to emigrate and flee. So that on top of regular reasons to move to the U.S., tons of just this giant German diaspora spreads to the Americas and Russia, but also the United States. What were some of the more popular states within the U.S. for German immigrants to go to? Cool question. The upper Midwest, especially like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and then also Illinois, there's a guy named Carl Schwarz, who goes from being a German-American immigrant to U.S. senator representing Missouri because there was enough of a German-American constituency.

So a lot of the middle of the country, also Texas. It was a few people who had come when it was still Mexico and then more people who came when it was a new U.S. area. All right. Interesting. So like especially central Texas, there's a huge German community. Yeah. So there's the popular custom of wearing Liederhausen and cowboy boots. You can't say, you can't say that's not an interesting look. I'm pretty into the concept, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is the Germans just kind of went everywhere because it was just so many German people. Apparently it was about five million. and Germans just between 1830 to 1890. And as of 1890, more than 4% of all Americans were ethnic Germans, most of them with a

connection to Europe and living memory. And as of 1900, the most common non-English language media in the country was German language, newspapers and other stuff too. So like racist white Americans who were here already, they responded to the Germans differently than they did to folks like Chinese people or Mexican people, they said, we'll fold the Germans in. They're white eventually. Like there's just too many of them.

They look white to me and that's it. Yeah. When it's not as easy to make a very quick visual judgment of someone, then it is easier for that xenophobia to die off. But yeah, it's a, but like it is funny because if you've ever been to Europe, you do find out that Europeans are still like really good at noticing very subtle differences between Europeans. When for me coming from America, they're like, oh, yeah, you know, like Croatians are so different from Bulgarians. I'm like, what are you talking about?

First of all, what is Bulgaria? Second, what is Croatia? Right. Is that where crows come from? Why don't you have hot dogs? Yeah, yeah. These very, I guess, primarily Anglo-white Americans, they were also quite upset about the Irish and the 1800s.

That was a smaller group of migrants, but also a big one. And so, like, this shift happened, but also took a very long time. And so for really the rest of the 1800s, what were considered white Americans made countless jokes about the Germans being like creepy, poor immigrant people that are different from them. In vaudeville, especially the 1870s and 1880s, there was a stock comic character named Carl Pretzel. I'm into the name a little bit. I know the origins are dark, but Carl Prutzel is a great thing. Yeah, and like his bits where he talked in a stupid accent, couldn't stop drinking beer and couldn't stop eating sausage.

Like those were the racist bits. Yeah. Like it's the same thing with like Irish stereotypes. It's like everyone's drunk and everyone like, oh, you have a food from the country. I guess that's all you ever eat. And then you can apply that to nearly any group of immigrants. And that's sort of like what the racist low-hanging fruit is. Yeah.

And US media and entertainment truly did that with everybody. Folks don't need me to list other examples. You get it. You get it. And also, Bruce Craig says there's a really weird thing where toward the end of the 1800s, lazy comedians started to try to make fun of German people and Irish people at the same time. Like, they tried to do both accents at once. I have no idea what that sounds like, but it's weird, probably. Well, let me try.

As you know, I'm exceedingly good at accents. Katie just stops breathing. Like, yeah. And then, like, the number one racist joke about Germans is that they love sausage, they must just be also so poor that they need to put dogs into the meat instead of better animals to eat. Apparently one weird way this has stuck with us is the, like, kind of harmless now children's song, oh, where, where has my little dog gone? Oh. Like that is now about like a kid who can't find their pet. But in the 1860s, it was a smash hit piece of sheet music about a stupid German who like is eating people's dogs.

Like the dog is going into their sausage was the lyrics. It's changed now. Sounds like the while being maybe ethically compromised, it's the people who keep losing their dogs. They're just stupid ones. Right? Like they can't keep track of their dogs and someone keeps making them into sausages and none are the wiser. Yeah, keep track of your dogs, folks. Right.

Yeah. And then also these anti-German jokes brought in one real thing that there's a breed of dog called the Doxent, which is like long and sausageish in shape. Oh, and so did that contribute to the lake? This dog is vaguely sausage shaped, so it must just be a sausage. Yes. Yeah, like stupid racist just made a non-connection into a connection. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love wiener dogs, though. They're so cute. They're really cute, yeah. And so like all this kind of amalgamated into an idea combining real traditions of German people making sausages with horrible racist ideas about them eating dogs. And then also like a little cart of. sausages was one economic foothold, a poor German immigrant could try to find. And so all that combined into the idea that like little processed sausages from a German person, let's call

that a hot dog with like a winking, there's probably dog in it, but also it's a German, you know? Right, right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I had no idea. I just, you know, I didn't question it, to be honest with you. Same. Yeah, yeah. I was just like a hot dog, you know, because it tastes like dog. I don't know. I've never had dog. So the closest I've had is my dog sneezing into my mouth. And that didn't taste great. So. And I'm genetically a coyote. So my taste buds are different. I can't really describe it. Right. Right. Yeah. But yeah, like apparently the earliest written record of anyone calling any kind of sausage a hot dog, it's the Knoxville Journal newspaper in 1893. So recent, like those machines I talked about before were making sausage that weren't quite called this yet. But in that paper, they describe Wienerworst men preparing hot dogs for sale outside. Like it's still Germans doing it is the very beginning. And then the one other thing that promoted this was a college humor magazine at Yale, Yale University. Apparently, the name hot dog was also slang, in a way we still use it today for somebody being a showoff. That sort of predates this. But they were using that and also had a local lunch wagon called the Kennel Club that had like dog iconography and anti-German jokes selling the food.

So Yaleys joked about the dog art being a memorial to the dogs and the sausages and their humor magazine. Because they're fancy Yale people, they're influential and elite media people spread it across the United States. Yeah. Yeah. See, this is why I'm correct to be skeptical of Yaleys. No other reasons in your educational history. So, but yeah, and the weird thing is basically there's a super rapid speed where Angleys. where Anglo, so-called white Americans bring Germans into whiteness, and then that dovetails with this whole meaning of hot dog kind of vanishing. People just moved on from joking about Germans eating dogs.

So then it just became a fun name for it. Yeah. I mean, that happens a lot, right? Like, you're like, oh, here's a fun, innocent thing. And then you look into its history. And it's like, oh, it's a hideous racism. And then we were like, you know, we became more chill over time. And then the thing just becomes less racist.

Totally. And the other thing that sped it up for hot dogs is they got associated with big public entertainment like sports. Yeah, baseball. Yeah. And baseball definitely drove it. Apparently there's a myth that hot dog's popularity began at a New York Giants baseball game in 1902 and a cartoon about it. No one can find the cartoon. It doesn't exist.

but the Irish-American humorist T.A. Dorgan did draw a 1906 cartoon about a well-attended bicycle race and the hot dog concept. So, yeah, like big spectator events, people, including Germans, really did sell the hot dogs from little carts. And so it really did become more of that thing than a German thing fast. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Hot dogs are cool. And I think it's just kind of a, it's a bummer to be mean to people all the time. So. Yeah, really. And you had two last stories that really exemplify this.

They're Oscar Meyer and also Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Oscar Meyer was a person and might be the biggest example of hot dogs going from a German thing to an American thing in our concept. There was a real guy. He immigrated to America from Southern Germany at age 14 and became a sausage maker in Chicago lands. But the first Oscar Meyer hot dogs were sold under extremely German branding. The brand name was Adel Weiss. And it had like alpine and little white flower old country stuff all over it. But within one generation, he sends his son, Oscar G. Meyer, to Harvard.

that guy's in like nice honor societies and then comes back and rebrands to the like plain red and yellow logo that indicates modernity and then gets the wiener mobiles going other American stunt type stuff going that's how fast German Americans became white became white Americans rolling in the wiener mobiles like a bunch of pansers right that's right that's right That's my secret. I'm still racist against Germans. The other giant trend in this is the two world wars. Like, German Americans really did get pressured to kind of cut it out, for sure. Yeah, yeah. That's also a huge part of this. Yeah. And speaking of Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, no German heritage.

He's very old Dutch Anglo, white American. But he came up with what has become called hot. dog diplomacy, where hot dogs are a force of like Americanness in the world, even though they were German like one second ago. Right, right. We do like to do that a lot. Yeah. And one amazing thing about the history of especially the U.S. and our alliance with

Britain is apparently as recently as 1939, no British monarch had ever been in the United States, like had never set foot here. mostly because of travel and stuff. Oh, I thought it was because we're just like, there's an open threat to the British monarchy, though. We'll throw you in the tea harbor with your precious tea. Yeah, it's like the stereotypical couple of colonial troops and the drummer has a bandage over his eye thing.

Yeah, they're just waiting for a new monarch to come, throw them in the Boston Harbor. Yeah, so apparently the summer of 1931, when war with the Nazis is looming, England's King George VI plans a trip to Canada. He's not even planning to come to the United States. But then FDR very cleverly, like immediately bothers him with an invite to come to the U.S. And instead of making it like a whole to-do state dinner at the White House, he says, come to my house in Hyde Park, New York, and have hot dogs.

That's it, you know. He tied a hot dog to some fishing wire. It passed it over the border to Canada and then slowly started reeling it in with just this monarch sort of floating after the smell, the good hot dog smell. The vice president's cooling a pie on the windows still. They're bringing out all the big goods. Yeah. Yeah, I guess FDR had done this one year earlier serving hot dogs to Swedish royals and that went pretty good. But then he was able to like cajole the British king and queen, who are Queen Elizabeth II's parents, the future Queen Elizabeth the second.

He cajoles them into coming over for hot dogs and like national U.S. media raves about this is King George's first time eating a hot dog. It's very exciting that he asks for a second hot dog, you know. But it becomes like a force for U.S. soft power in the whole world. Right. rebranded German sausages. Right, right. Yeah, where it's like, hey, would we be bad if we offered you a hot dog? Can we be so bad?

Right, we're just casual and fun. You don't need to, it's not hard for you to work us into your trip to Canada, swing down to the Hudson Valley of New York. And yeah. Yeah. And Bruce Craig cites a truly astounding newspaper article. It's from November 1941. So immediately before Pearl Harbor, there's already a,

world war going on and the Germans are being terrible. But the Detroit Free Press newspaper, they write about the hot dog and say, quote, the hot dog may have a long Teutonic ancestry. But from White House to Havel, he's a thoroughly naturalized American now without a single Nazi sympathy. Like we explicitly talked ourselves through the process of this is not German anymore. It's American. It's good. It's good. Germans are bad. This is good. When he says he, he means the hot dog itself is not a Nazi sympathizer? Yeah, the hot dog. Yeah. I see. Okay. I mean, yeah, it's, you are what you eat, so you don't want to be eating Nazi sympathizer hot dogs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You really don't. So, no. It's a wild shift. And, and also, I don't feel bad about, like, using the term hot dog.

It's no longer an insult to my ethnicity. But it was, like, it really started that way. Well, Alex, whenever I say the term hot dog, I mean it. derogatoratively. Derogatoratively. Derogatoratively, pejoratively. In a derogatory fashion. Like we rap taping, you're like, Alex, you're going to have lunch? You're going to have lunch? Can you eat something? Can you eat a hot dog? And by hot dog, I mean, a warmed up dachshund? That's a dog. It's extraordinary. And our bonus this week is about one. more soft power American thing that's shocking. Yeah, I would like to state for the record, I'm not racist against Germans.

Many of my friends are Germans, and I think two of my friends are turned. And there is one last story involving a German person. It's our last takeaway number three. The most popular origin myth for the hot dog business celebrates a guy who, in real life tried to crush the hot dog business. I find this truly shocking. It's a story of a guy named Charles Feldman. And as Bruce Craig and Jamie Loftes and other people write,

there's not actually one like inventor of hot dogs. It's just that a lot of poor German immigrants sold them from carts to like get a basic foothold in the economy of the United States. Right. But people have tried to find like baseball games or celebrities or some other way to describe hot dogs blossoming from one events. And the most credited guy for it is a guy who actually tried to stamp out hot dog sellers on Coney Island. He like in real life is totally the totally trying to prevent hot dogs from taking off. Right, right. Was he,

did he have his own hot dog biz or did he just have something against hot dogs? Yeah, he was basically doing every other kind of food and entertainment. business possible. Oh, okay. And then decided hot dog sellers were cutting into his profits. Right. What kind of foods was he selling? Initially, pie. He had what was called a pie wagon, which is basically the same as a little hot dog cart, but for pie. The one reason it makes sense people attributed this to this guy is that Charles Feldman was a German immigrants. He was probably Feldman before they anglicized it. Right. And key sources here are the Coney Island History Project. That's an exhibition that they do in Brooklyn there. And digital resources from

the Smithsonian, Bruce Craig's book. If I can label it clearly, I'll also link a bunch of things like different Smithsonian stuff where they claim Charles Feldman sparked hot dogs. He super did not. The real deal about him, he really was a German immigrant. He arrived in New York City in 1856 at the age of 15. And also, Coney Island was a real hotbed of hot dog culture. It also helped. lead to styles of hot dog, especially in Michigan that are called conies. It's like simply a reference to Coney Island having good hot dogs. It's not really based on that. And Coney Island just, it's like a sort of a amusement park big stretch.

Not really an amusement park. What would you call it? Yeah, yeah. It's like beaches and carnivals. It's on the beach. It's on the beach, yeah. But it's like, it's a big beach side area. and there's like rides and food and entertainment.

Yeah, exactly. It's like a bunch of sideshows, carnivals, restaurants, stuff. And then there's a beach, yeah. And it's not necessarily, it's not like Disneyland where it's all under the same ownership. Yeah, that's very important. So Charles Feldman almost became the Walt Disney of Coney Island, pretty much. And he's an exciting guy. It's not his fault, the myth that got applied to him.

But he apparently, you know, he's a teenager arriving in a new country. He needs to eat and make a living. And so he starts pushing a pie wagon around Coney Island. And then with like the basic scrape together profits of his pie wagon, he's able to lease a small plot of land to set up a restaurant. and apparently he was excellent at business. So within a few decades, he owns a whole city block. It's nine restaurants, a roller coaster, a carousel, a ballroom, an outdoor movie theater, an entire hotel, a beer garden, a bathhouse, a pavilion, two huge bars.

There's something called a maple garden. He called it Ocean Pavilion, a lot of it. And apparently it was serving five million customers a year by the 1920. He's this giant entrepreneur. He's amazing. That's a, that's a lot from just starting out from a humble, humble pie wagon selling humble pie. Yeah, he like really worked, really saved and invested back in his own thing. And he was mainly a bakery. Like he baked pies. And so he picked a good location like Coney Islands developing New York City is explosively growing.

and people will just locally spend time there for fun. So he did a bunch of smart business things. But the trouble is along the way people decided he pretty much invented hot dogs. Huh. And he did the opposite. Right. Because he was trying to push out any competition. Yeah, he was basically just trying to own everything.

I see. And someone with a small sausage cart selling little hot dogs, he couldn't own that. And so that's just revenue that's not going to him. But it is like true that the worst thing about him is he didn't feel that much solidarity with his fellow German-American immigrants. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Apparently in real life, his empire did not include any hot dog stands all the way until 1886. So that's pretty much two decades into him doing some kind of business on Coney Islands. And Bruce Craig finds, like, records in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper where, among other things, Charles Feldman says, quote, sausages must go. Like, he tries to, like, loop together powerful people and government to limit or restrict these little sausage sellers just because it's cutting into his giant business empire on Cody Island. Right, right. There was no pretext to, like, oh, these are dangerous dogs. It was just, just I don't like them because it makes it harder for me to make even more ballrooms. I wish I had more of like the text of this stuff, but I could imagine him playing on the idea that hot dogs are unsanitary meat, you know?

Right, right. Like you don't have to claim German people eat dogs, you can say. This is like old weird sausage, you know. Like I feel like this is two sides of the American rags to riches thing, right? Because it's like, oh, that's kind of, that's like a cute story, right? he comes, he's got his little pie wagon, and he really makes it, right? He goes from being a poor teenager to making it. And then it kind of turns into this thing where it's almost like just an addiction to

domination, right, where he can't abide any other immigrant teenagers making money. Yeah, pretty much. And then like somehow along the way people decided Charles Feldman invented hot dogs as part of his giant business empire. Like the myth claims that on one of a few different years, nobody even has a clear year for it. But like sometime in the 1870s, mythically, he asked a wheelwright to make him a little wagon

with a burner inside to heat water that hot dogs are in. And like, oh, I found my hit product. Now I can be rich. But he got rich doing absolutely everything else. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, in a way that's sort of like, divine punishment for his greed.

Yeah. Well, and then the other really strange thing is a real competitor popped up and people kind of folded it into a myth about Feldman inventing hot dogs. What really happened is in 1916, Feltman has died. His descendants are running his business. And an employee of the Feltman basically conglomerate decides, I'm going to leave and start my own business a few blocks away. The guy is named Nathan Handwerker, and he starts Nathan's famous hot dogs, which is now a gigantic,

like you can buy Nathan's hot dog items in grocery stores all over the country. Right. And so people kind of said that the myth is, oh, Feltman had the hot dog, but then his employee betrayed him or whatever. But no, Feltman, like, built a business empire, died, regretted that hot dog sellers ate into it, And then one of his employees started a hot dog brand later. That's it. Right.

Yeah. It's like, my life's one regret is not stopping the hot dog. It's such a strange, like origin story people tried to find for this big cultural trends. Don't let me be remembered for hot dogs. Please. Right. Usually people like overstate someone who was at least involved in it, you know, but this guy did the opposite and gets credit for inventing it. It's so weird.

Right, right, right. He's a restless ghost now who goes around saying, oh, it was pies. Pyes! Yeah, he's trying to take the NR train back into Manhattan to tell people. Yeah, yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, and it's not just going to be helped remembering the episode. I also want to drop in a special message and fun thing from Friends of ours.

I mentioned that I've written humor for a truly amazing comedy website, and not amazing because of me. It's called 1-900 hotdog.com. I hope you're already familiar with it, and many people from it have guessed it on the show before. But Robert Brackway and Sean Baby are the creators of that website. I wanted to ask them the standard starting sift question of what's your relationship to hot dogs or opinion of hot dogs. And they gave me a hilarious answer that you can hear. Now, I'm going to play it right now. Please enjoy this clip.

I'm Sean Bebe. I invented being funny on the internet. You may know me from there. Ah, hot dogs. Native food and used to measure food championship. they are more than a meal, they are the quilt of meat pots that make us America,

from slime they come and to slime they return. Hot dogs! In a gown, they're ready for any black tie event, but between teeth, they lay their feet at the feet of your mouth. Will hot dogs know mercy or another betrayal? Hot dogs! My relationship with hot dogs

as a man, as an eater? I could have laid money that you were going to do the Orson Wells. Ah, hot dogs, because I thought about doing it too. Oh, hot dogs. Oh, hot dogs. 17 more? How many hot dogs is too many?

Surely death is a small price to pay to find out coward hot dogs. Leading to a story of beef, pork, rarely chicken of their faces, lips, and assholes of everything they've given for us, for you, for your buns. Clap, clap, clap, clap, go your buns for hot dogs, mustard? What are you without hot dogs? Hot dog abandoned and forgotten, separating into spit and seed. Your two worthless parts, your only friend without hot dog. You shall never have an episode of fascination, mustard. Hot dogs!

Where was I? Hot dogs! Tell your pediatrician about hot dogs. Tell your lawyer they're called Wieners. He can't do anything about it. And he knows. Weeners, as hot dogs are sometimes known weeners. What on earth can I say?

Who can I say in response? of that other than oh hot dogs hot dogs didn't even get to introduce myself from robert brockway see you in hell the end hot dog yeah so there you go as as i understood they did not actually name the website after hot dogs it's just a fun comedic thing to call the website and it's absolutely wonderful so please check their workout it's phenomenal and hey let's give you some help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, a Canadian marketing stunt indicates that the different amounts of hot dogs in packages versus hot dog buns in packages is the scam we all think it is. Companies could

change that at any time and briefly did in Canada in 2022. Takeaway number two, the name hot dog originated from racist mockery of German people and then surprisingly rapidly Americanized into not meaning that. Takeaway number three, the most popular origin myth for the hot dog business celebrates Charles Feldman, a guy who in real life thought the hot dog business was eating into his profits in every other kind of commerce on Coney Island. And then a pretty loaded stats and numbers before that about the gigantic 20,000 year history of sausage in the world, also the making of hot dogs.

the potential birth dates of 1868 or the 1920s for the culture of this U.S. sausage item. And then a few stories of false or true carcinogens and bad things in hot dogs. Those are the takeaways. And I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason that this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is all about the Nathan's brand of hot dogs that we mentioned at the end of the main show. It is about Nathan's draconian policies in the U.S. and heroic support of Ukraine.

They are really interesting inside and outside of our borders. Visit sifpod.f.f fund for that bonus show for a library of more. than 25 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just from members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week are led by an astounding history book. It is called Hot Dog, a Global History. It's written by Bruce Craig, Emeritus Professor of History at Roosevelt University. Another very helpful book is

Raw Dog, The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by a wonderful comedian podcaster and more Jamie Loftus. We also leaned on historical digital resources from the Coney Island History Project from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. I'm excited for you to see a How It's Made video from the science channel. They posted it to YouTube for you.

And the best coverage of the scam of hot dog packages and hot dog bun packages is from NPR. and from CBC Radio in the U.S. and then in Canada. That page also features resources such as native-dash-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy,

and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 10 that is about Franklin Pierce, a relatively fascinating.

relatively obscure president of the United States. One fun fact there, there used to be a county named after Franklin Pierce's awful vice president, and then Washington State named it after a much better guy with the same last name. So I recommend that episode, if you want to find out who that is. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Budo's Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. Thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists' own shows.

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