Hot diggity dog July is National Hot Dog Month!
Lest you think National Hot Dog Month was just a scheme dreamed up by mustard makers to sell more condiments, I’ll have you know that Congress declared July to be National Hot Dog month way back in 1957. I think you’ll agree that whether you call them wieners, franks or hot dogs they are dog-gone good and they deserve a month of their own.
A Babylonian named Frank Furter was the first person to stuff a bunch of meat and sawdust into animal intestines. Just kidding. Actually, the frankfurter is thought to have originated in Frankfurt, Germany, over 500 years ago. (This was the same time that wieners were invented in Vienna.)
The sausages made their way to this country with early immigrants but it wasn’t until 1904 that the frankfurter was Americanized. A vendor at the St. Louis Exposition was selling sausages but they were “too hot to handle.” So with each sausage he handed out a glove. When the vendor ran out of gloves he asked his brother in law, a baker, to make some buns to fit around his sausages. Thus the hot dog was born and now there are 3,000 licensed hot dog vendors in New York City alone.
Before the wieners were referred to as “hot dogs” they were known in this country as Dachshund sausages, named after the wiener dog of the same general conformation. The term “hot dog” crept into our vocabulary when a cartoonist, Tod Dorgan, drew a picture of a Dachshund sausage but, like me, didn’t know how to spell Dachshund. So he just called them “hot dogs” and the name became part of our jargon just as hot dogs became part of our diet. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council Americans purchase 9 billion hot dogs per year from grocery stores. Adding in what would be consumed at restaurants or ball parks, the NHDSC estimates that the total number consumed in a year is approximately 20 billion hot dogs.
Babe Ruth is said to have once downed 12 hot dogs between games of a doubleheader but that doesn’t even come close to the record set In 2021 when Joey Chestnut set the world record for hot dogs and buns eaten with 76. Chestnut set the world record twice in the prior three contests: He makes almost half a million dollars per year competing in eating contests and selling his own line of condiments.
Between Memorial Day and Labor Day 5 billion hot dogs will be consumed, most of them at sporting events. During one World Series game there were enough hot dogs ingested that if laid end to end they would have stretched for five miles. (Who calculates these things I wonder?)
It’s estimated that 95% of American households purchase hot dogs and that over 50 million are consumed daily. They come in all shapes and sizes. The longest hot dog on record was a 1,983 foot hot dog made in 1983 in Michigan and the heaviest was a 681 pounder made in 1987 in Chicago. That’s a lot of mustard.
Surprisingly, adults eat more hot dogs than children and women eat more than men.
All this information still does not answer the most often asked question about hot dogs. “Why are hot dogs sold 10 to a package but the buns come eight to a pack?”
