Again I’m browsing food related stuff on YouTube, both for good and bad foods (according to the people posting them). I watched videos about foods people find disgusting. Invariably, hot dog wieners are brought up. In one of these videos (of which I don’t remember the title so I can’t link to it), the poster promises to prove to the viewer just how disgusting hot dogs wieners are. Of course, he assures us that if we ever saw how these sausages are made, we would never eat them, ever. It’s a comment that I’ve heard a lot over the years.
So the clip shows the standard shots of hot dog meat being ground up and made into a paste as the poster goes on about how hot dogs are made from leftover cuts of beef, chicken, pork, and turkey.
It shows the meat being ground up and mixed with spices like paprika and suchlike, and then they are stuffed into sausage casings, and there they are! Hot dogs! Aren’t they disgusting?
Actually, he said, “Are you so enthusiastic about hot dogs after seeing how they’re made?”
He sounded especially perturbed about “leftover” cuts of meat being used. He didn’t specifically mention “Pig face! Pig snouts!” like most of these sorts of descriptions kids use to use to gross out their friends at barbeques, but the meaning is the same.
For heaven’s sake, don’t we praise fancy chefs to the skies for using the whole animal in their “nose to tail” cooking? Don’t foodies go into raptures about that? Pig face? Have you never had hog jowls? They are delicious! Pig snouts? Have you never tasted headcheese with mustard? Divine!
Also, what’s with the zooming close ups of big vats of meat paste? All that contains is meat chopped and ground fine. It’s still just meat. There’s nothing disgusting in how small you cut the particles. Have you never had mashed potatoes? Peanut butter? Chocolate mousse? Why should a meat paste make you shudder?
I think a big part of what grosses people out when it comes to hot dogs and sausages (and anything else made in a similar fashion) is the steps in between it looking like meat and it looking like a sausage. People aren’t fans of seeing their food when it looks like a slurry of pink paste.
I like beef hot dogs, just try not to think about what’s in them. When I found out that bacon is made from pork belly I was a little grossed out but I still love bacon.
Sounds like that thing Jamie Oliver tried to argue, showing kids how they make chicken nuggets. In the UK, showing them the process made the kids not want them,* but US kids still wanted nuggets.
*To be fair, it could just be that kids in the UK picked up on the sarcastic question while IS kids just thought he was offering free food, not realizing he’d still feed them anyways, just with his own homemade fried chicken.
Yes, but why the laser focus on hot dogs? No one ever mentions how disgusting breakfast sausage links are, or hamburger patties, or salami. While bologna is sometimes sneered at as being low class, no one actually calls its manufacture disgusting. Why is hot dog processing so reviled specifically?
I guess that’s the part that isn’t so clear. Whatever they’re made of has been ground into unidentifiable mush. The temptation for crooked manufacturers to goose the dogs’ weight with [gross thing of your choice] to beef up the bottom line is a tale as old as time. Puns intended.
”Pink slime” isn’t just “chopped up and ground fine” like fresh sausage; it is processed with an ionizing solvent (typically liquid ammonia, or for ‘organic’ products, highly concentrated citric acid) to help break down lipids and kill bacteria. The health consequences of highly processed foods is still active area of research but there is a broad consensus that they are much less healthy than ‘whole’ foods, and likely contribute to obesity, chronic hormonal dysfunction, and cancers of the digestive system. From a production standpoint “lean finely textured beef products” are almost as gross as “vegetable oil”, but if you don’t see any part of the production chain and enjoy the homogenous texture and bland flavor, I suppose you might find it cromulent.
Most people like meat, but very few like all meat. There is no way to tell what animals or parts of animals are in a hot dog other than trusting the labeling. Even if it says “all beef” or “all pork” that doesn’t necessarily exclude things like organs (they gotta use those hog rectums for something…)
I think it’s because hotdogs are so uniform. Even the cheapest thing you would recognize as a “sausage” instead of a “hot dog” has some degree of texture to it that allows you to identify it as “ground up meat”. But hot dogs take it to the level where you can’t ever find an identifiable chunk that you can label “meat”. There’s a perception there that this allows the hot dog manufacturers to get away with more than the sausage makers.
Of course, it’s all kinds of silly. The end product is still edible, and rather cheap, and as said, uses up a lot of cuts that would otherwise be garbage. I suspect the horror over hot dogs has a lot more to do with hating poor people food than hating the hot dogs themselves. You bloody peasants should be buying more expensive foods!
