Time Essay: The Decline and Fill of the American Hot Dog

FRANKFURTER can be found just below Frankenstein in the dictionary. It can also be found immediately beneath contempt in Ralph Nader’s vast lexicon of villains. To Nader, the ABM and the smart bomb are scarcely more lethal than a chain of processed sausages. Hot dogs, insists the consumer advocate, are “among America’s deadliest missiles.” New York City’s Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson agrees: “After I found out what was in hot dogs, I stopped eating them.” This people’s entrée, this frank companion of alfresco meals and ball games—can it really be a finger-shaped monster? So it appears.

When a German-born restaurateur named Charles Feltman first popularized the frankfurter on a roll 100 years ago, the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce refused to endorse the sobriquet “hot dog.” They thought it might evoke notions of processed mongrel. Today the public has less fanciful worries. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since 1937 the frankfurter has gone from 19% fat and 19.6% protein to 28% fat and only 11.7% protein. (The rest is water, salt, spices and preservatives.) This deterioration is yet another of technology’s ambiguous gifts.

Not long ago, for example, it was difficult to pulverize poultry cheaply; now hot-dog manufacturers enthusiastically chicken out, cramming up to 15% of their sausages with bird parts. Poultry is one of the more appetizing ingredients. Federal law allows hot dogs to contain such animal features as esophagi, ears, lips and snouts. In the words of Robert Benchley: “Ain’t it offal?” And even these ingredients do not exhaust the bad news. Hot dogs are brimming with additives, including sodium nitrite, sodium acid pyrophosphate and glucona delta lactone. Without such chemicals, the hot dog would lose its pink blush and turn the color of unwashed sneakers. The wiener may also contain “binders,” like dried milk, cereal or starchy vegetable flour. According to Consumers Union, there can also be occasional insect parts and rodent hairs. Moreover, frankfurters are no longer a bargain. There is little honest protein in even the purest of all-beef kosher franks. Discarding fat, water, etc., what protein remains comes to more than $10 per pound. For that you can get truffles. Or 4 Ibs. of filet mignon. Or 8 Ibs. of hamburger.

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For all its critics, the hot dog, like any other American institution, does have its loyal defenders. “If I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,” insists the jingle, “everyone would be in love with me.” Edwin Anderson, president of the Zion Foods Corp., salutes the frankfurter with a serious mien. “Hot dogs,” he maintains, “are still the American’s favorite meat food. Let’s compare apples with apples. The hot dog is a ready-to-eat product and should be compared with other similar products rather than with hamburger, which loses 30% to 40% of its weight in cooking.” Adds Michael Levine of Continental Seasoning: “There are fewer chemicals in franks than in most of your cereals, mustard, mayonnaise or oleomargarine.” Their logic does not stand grilling. Franks present should only be compared with franks past. As for mustard, it goes on those dubious wieners, adding its adulterates to theirs.

The frank still exerts appeal, but increasingly it has found succulent rivals in every U.S. city. McDonald’s burgers (which are expressly forbidden by the franchiser to contain “hearts, lungs, tripe, suet, flavor boosters, preservatives, protein additives, fillers or cereals”) have long passed the 6 billion mark in sales. The Near East may never solve its tensions, but American Arabs and Jews agree upon the merits of the felafel — Arabian bread stuffed with beans, salad, pickle, ol ives and sesame sauce. The gyro, a Greek concoction of lamb, tomato and onion, has pre-empted the frankfurter’s place on many Eastern city streets. On both coasts, the Mexican taco has become a short-order staple. Soul food has gone national. Colonel Sanders’ finger-lickin’ Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets now number 3,500. The pizza, according to a Gallup Organization poll, is the No. 1 favorite snack of 21-to-34-year-olds. (Any of those foods many contain additives, too, but they have not yet been in the Nader pressure cooker.)

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Few hot-dog manufacturers have bothered to read the entrails. For despite the tocsins from Washington, despite intruders from overseas, the maligned frank furter has proved as irresistible in 1972 as it was in 1914 to a boy named Penrod. The hero of Booth Tarkington’s Huckleberry novels thought the “winny-wurst” was “all nectar and ambrosia. ..it was rigidly forbidden by the home authorities.” Like Penrod, contemporary Americans tend to ignore authorities; they consume 15 billion hot dogs every year — possibly even because of the warnings. Forbidden fruit tastes delicious; why not proscribed wieners?

There are other, better reasons for the hot dog to be top dog. Crackling tidily above briquettes, steaming under vendors’ umbrellas and in short-order restaurants, the frank still emits a sharp democratic zonk, redolent of exotic spices and domestic meats. To most Americans, the hot dog is the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine; it triggers memories of afternoons in the bleachers, and languorous Sundays spent lolling on pic nic grounds. At 170 calories, it is modest enough to be included in a dietary lunch; yet the gourmet James Beard has wrapped a recipe around it: choucroute àl’sacienne. (Translation: sauerkraut with local sausage. Beard prefers franks.)

Given these statistics and endorsements, even Ralph Nader would have to agree with Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s dictum: “No candidate for any office can hope to get elected in this country without being photographed eating a hot dog.” (Indeed, F.D.R. went so far as to serve franks to King George VI.) One of those candidates, a consumer named Richard Nixon, once announced, “I come from humble origins. Why, we were raised on hot dogs and hamburgers. We’ve got to look after the hot dog.”

Yet neither politicians nor preservatives can guarantee shelf life forever. Those who see the hot dog as an American symbol may be discomfited to learn that its very ethos is vanishing. Once, for example, franks were the staple of daytime World Series games. But this year, all weekday Series games will be played at night. Who wants a hot dog after dinner?

Europeans have customarily treated the wiener as a shaggy hot-dog story, absurdly amusing but not to be consumed too often or too seriously. It is quite possible that Whole Earth sensibilities, newly sophisticated palates and consumerism may yet do in the little sausage whose manufacturers arrogantly refuse to beef it up — or pork it out. In that case, the great American hot dog will be only a memory. And, perhaps, many of the cherished institutions that seemed to go with it.

Eventually, history judges a country as much by its cuisine as by its politics. As Lin Yutang rhetorically inquired: “What is patriotism but the love of the good things we ate in our childhood?”

Stefan Kanfer