Like many kids, I was a picky eater — something I worked hard to grow out of as an adult — which meant that one of my most common meals was hot dogs. The main way I remember eating hot dogs as a kid was cooked in the microwave and then cut up into slices and eaten with ketchup. Even when I ate the dog whole in a bun, I only used ketchup.
Then for years, I didn’t eat hot dogs at all because I stopped eating red meat. Then came the hot dog rollers. I worked at a movie theater for several years in college and it had the kind of hot dog roller you see at 7/11. It took at least a half hour of rolling on that thing to get cooked, so you just had to throw some on at various points in the shift so they’d be ready for selling, but sometimes they never got sold and rolled around for hours until either they were too gnarly to sell or we closed up for the night, at which point whoever was working got to eat the hot dogs. Sometimes we’d put more hot dogs than were necessary on the rollers just so we could ensure there’d be leftovers at the end. Sometimes we just ate hot dogs anyway because we were paid $7.25 an hour, which is not enough to buy a meal at most establishments (can you believe in the year 2023, the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is still $7.25 nd has been since 2009?)
Now, I love hot dogs, and I always eat them with mustard and relish, and sometimes ketchup. My favorite genre is a Chicago dog (with everything except the sport peppers). But the best way to eat a hot dog is roasted on a stick over a bonfire, where one side is slightly underdone, and the other side is so done it’s bursting at the seams. Last summer, my friends and I got so into hot dogs that we name our group chat Hotdoglovers420. Now it’s a space to send any hot dog news or memes that we come across, for example this).
The biggest hot dog news of the year is the release of Jamie Loftus’ book “Raw Dog: The naked truth about hot dogs,” which I recently read. The book follows a road trip across America to try regional hot dogs and is described as “part travelogue, part culinary history, all capitalist critique.”
I’m only tangentially familiar with Loftus’ work; she’s known for her limited-run podcasts on niche subjects, like one where she investigated Mensa or another about the “Cathy” comic strip. I’ve never listened to any of her podcasts, even though they all sound interesting, because it’s hard to get into a new podcast. I don’t have more than like, three podcasts in my rotation at any time. But that’s why I read her book, which is about hot dogs, but also food history, labor rights, class, a breakup, and hot dog-eating champion Joey Chestnut (whose dad’s name is Merlin Chestnut, by the way).
Loftus lets us know up top that this cross-country road trip took place in 2021, when the pandemic was still in full throttle, and that she embarked on the road trip with her boyfriend, who she’s broken up with by the end. The book is partially a memoir, as Loftus weaves in her life throughout the cultural history of hot dogs — both her current life as a person going through a breakup while being evicted by a developer and her life growing up in Brockton, Massachusetts. As she tells it, she’s one of the first in her family to leave the Boston area and picks a few pit stops on the trip to take care of her father, who is going through lung cancer treatment.
But most “Raw Dog” does focus on the dogs, from Sonoran-style hot dogs in Arizona, to New York street dogs, to something called a Texas Dog that is actually from New Jersey. She tries dogs that are covered in cheese, mystery sauces, pickled things, and dogs that are grilled, fried, and boiled. There are stadium dogs, gimmicky dogs, and gentrified dogs. But as much as she gives great detail about the taste and texture of the dogs (wet buns are a frequent issue), she also does a deep dive into how hot dogs became popular, where different regional varieties came from, and, inevitably, the modern-day horrors of meatpacking plant working conditions.
Loftus mentions in the book several times that she was repeatedly denied tours of meat plants for health and safety reasons, which is a real LOL because she also lays out in great detail the way meatpacking plants endangered their employees at the height of the pandemic outbreak. At the biggest meatpacking plants in the country, 59,000 combined workers got COVID, and over 200 died, and it wasn’t because they were going out to eat with their friends!
For every seemingly banal part of a hot dog’s existence, Loftus finds a deeper history or meaning. Even when writing about the grotesque performance that is the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, she points out the gender disparity between the contests — the men’s contest is shown on ESPN while the women’s contest, which happens only 30 minutes prior, is aired on ESPN3 (sidenote: for the subreddit r/theocho which collects obscure sports and contests, for example the “wife carrying championships”).
If you have an affinity for hot dogs, I recommend this book because it will both increase your love and lust for hot dogs while also making you feel utter disgust about the state of labor and meat production in this country. That’s hot dogs, baby!