Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Hot Dogs

Episode notes

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why hot dogs are secretly incredibly fascinating. (Plus, a special message from Robert Brockway and Seanbaby, who founded 1900HOTDOG.com)

Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week’s bonus episode.

LINKS FOR KATIE GOLDIN:

• Katie Goldin on Bluesky
• @ProBirdRights on Bluesky
• ‘Creature Feature’ podcast (iHeartRadio)
• When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide (Audubon)

SPECIAL LINKS FOR OUR HOT DOG FRIENDS:

• Robert Brockway and Seanbaby are the creators of 1900HOTDOG.com, the last and best comedy website. Support them on Patreon! And here’s a specific link to Alex’s article for 1900HOTDOG about Dick Portillo, the Portillo’s chain, and joking about the website having no relationship to hot dogs.
• Jamie Loftus guested on our recent SIF episode about pressed pennies, guested on a recent Judge John Hodgman episode about hot dogs, and is the author of Raw Dog (see research links below).

RESOURCES USED TO INFORM THE EPISODE’S LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

• native-land.ca
• U.S. Department Of Arts And Culture
• The True Native New Yorkers Can Never Truly Reclaim Their Homeland (Smithsonian)
• “Finding Lenapehoking” (YouTube / Hudson River Maritime Museum)
• Why Do They Call It Beacon? (The Highlands Current)
• Dutch & Native American Heritage In The Hudson River Valley (National Park Service)

RESEARCH SOURCES:

• Hot Dog: A Global History by Bruce Kraig
• Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus
• YouTube upload of the Science Channel show How It’s Made, and their segment on Hot Dogs — this clip came highly recommended from Jamie Loftus’s book Raw Dog, and commenters continue to post that the book brought them here.
• Libraries: Ask An Archivist – Answers! (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Argonne Grows From A Land Of Enchantment (Chicago Tribune)
• It’s official: Bacon, hot dogs, other processed meat cause cancer (Ars Technica)
• Worms in Balogna? Absolutely not. But here is the question I got: “A friend told me that that ground up earthworms are being used as fillers in many meat products like wieners and bologna. The name on the package is sodium erythorbate. I’ve checked packages at stores here and have found only one brand without this ingredient. My little boy loves hot dogs and I hate to think how many I’ve fed him over the past several years with earthworms in them.” (McGill University Office for Science and Society)
• 10 wieners per pack, but only 8 buns per bag. Hotdog council calls for a fix (CBC Radio)
• Petition Calls For Equal Number Of Packaged Hot Dogs And Buns (NPR)
• Links to articles from Reader’s Digest Canada and Mental Floss which take the Heinz Ketchup Canada petition’s claims as true on their face, and repeat the (likely false) industry claims about the impossibility of matching the hot dog package and bun package numbers.
• Get Your Red-Hot History Lesson! How the Hot Dog Rose From Coney Island Carts to Platters at Presidential Picnics (Smithsonian Magazine)
• The Germans in America: German-American Newspapers (Library Of Congress)
• biography of Carl Schurz (University Of Virginia Miller Center)
• The German Influence in Texas: History and Cultural Impact (Texas State Historical Association)
• Why American Leaders Relish Hot-Dog Diplomacy (Gastro Obscura)
• Vance defends spreading claims that Haitian migrants are eating pets (NPR)
• JD Vance admits he is willing to ‘create stories’ to get media attention (The Guardian)
• Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets (BBC News)
• Charles Feltman: Inventor of the Hot Dog (Coney Island History Project)
• Object: Pie wagon, ca. 1897 (Smithsonian National Museum of American History)
• Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: The Color Red
• Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Pistachios