Okay, so don’t even get me started on hotdogs. Mmm…hotdogs. Images of summer barbeques. Perfectly grilled dogs in the middle of toasted rolls just smothered with your favorite primary color condiments. Or how about wrapped in a Pillsbury crescent roll surrounded with cheese. Ultimate hot dog decadence. And what trip to Coney Island would be complete without a trip on the cyclone – subsequent chiropractor appointment not included, watching fathers and sons trap crabs off the pier using coolers of raw chicken as bait and enjoying a famous dog at Nathan’s. Nothing like standing over their outdoor counter bar while underfoot sprawls a mélange of ketchup and pigeon crap.
It’s hard to say exactly how hot dogs came into being or who coined the term. It seems to be an Americanized version of sausage. I completely understand and condone our resourceful forbearers who wasted nothing. By all means, if you’re going to kill a cow, use every part of it you can. Boil the bones, make a broth and take all the itty-bitty pieces of ‘waste’ meat and stuff it into a casing before you cook it. Voila, a hot dog. One that was produced from a happy roaming grass eating, therefore not antibiotic injected, animal. One that didn’t need a shelf life of a couple of years therefore didn’t need the addition of nitrates, nitrites, or other preservatives along with artificial color and flavor. I don’t care if it’s Kosher or has a natural casing. The inside of today’s wiener is made up of a product most appetizingly called ‘meat slurry’ or ‘meat emulsion’ which is leftover muscle and accessory parts mechanically scoured off the cow bones. It is used for two purposes only: animal feed and. …hotdogs.
Hotdogs consumed in high enough numbers are carcinogenic mostly manifesting in childhood leukemia. Yet, this ‘food’ lurks on every NY street corner and children’s menu from restaurants to schools. Now, I understand why this is on one level. It’s cheap, easy, long shelf life and most of all, there’s an undying demand for them. Kids love ‘em and so do their parents. I own a picky 4 year old and one of the 5 foods he’ll eat is hotdog. But what I learned early on is that there are alternatives and I’m not talking about the truly tasteless vegetarian versions that my child wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Once only found in natural grocers, packages of uncured, nitrate/nitrite free organic beef hotdogs are now nestled between the plethora of regular dogs in mainstream grocery stores. Buy them if you or your children eat them. Of course they’re still made from some form of ‘meat slurry’ and are high in sodium and fat. But at least no one will get cancer from them and at least we can stop supporting the companies that make the gross ones. They smell the same. They taste almost the same. They are a little denser in consistency and are a darker color. And they cost about a dollar more per package, which is about twenty cents more per dog. No big deal. Yet no one I’ve ever talked to has heard that there is a choice out there. And most people know that hot dogs aren’t good for you, but don’t really know why.
Read the labels carefully. There are uncured, preservative free, natural, organic, nitrate/nitrite free, grass fed, grass finished hotdogs. You want the label to say all of these. Splurge. After all, it’s a hotdog not caviar. Trader Joe’s makes a decent product. So does Applegate Farms which also has a good article on their web-site about all this. It can be found at:
http://www.applegatefarms.com/uploadedFiles/Resources/News/nytImes_070506.pdf
I am not a purist. I will eat the ‘bad’ kind of hot dog again in my lifetime, as will my children. But not often and never in my own home. I do the best I can in our imperfect world as do we all. But I encourage all of us to take all the teeny steps we can to eat real food especially when it’s as easy as sifting through packages of hot dogs at the store and asking the manager to carry them if we don’t see them. The same goes for lunchmeat and bacon by the way.
