Pig butts.
They're in your hot dogs, and you're eating them.
Or at least that's what the popular myth states- along with other questionable and hardly edible
body parts of various animals.
But what's really in your hot dog?
The truth may shock you, and perhaps change your mind on America's favorite baseball treat.
Americans eat a whopping 20 billion hot dogs every year, with many of those consumed as
favorite snacks at America's favorite pastime- watching men hit balls with bats and do some
very light cardio in between.
But there's one thing that even the most avid hot dog fan typically doesn't want to know,
and that's what goes into making these tasty tube steaks.
When you look at a butcher's diagram of a pig or a cow, you'll notice the copious absence
of any long, tube-like cuts of meat.
That's because much like ground meat or sausage, hot dogs are basically just the ground up
bits of other cuts of meat.
In the good old days when men were still men, and they died in horrific industrial accidents
at the age of 14, hot dogs included such things as dog, horse, and even sawdust.
But then an uppity young social justice upstart named Upton Sinclair went undercover in the
factories of the early 1900s and uncovered a bunch of nasty little secrets about the
food and manufacturing industries.
His immediate best seller, The Jungle, was written based on his experiences working in
the factories of early 1900s America, and exposed a litany of horrors brought to you
courtesy of the industrial revolution and completely unregulated industry.
Modern hot dogs have ditched the dog and sawdust, and now contain the leftover trimmings from
beef, pork, turkey and chicken.
One of the most common ingredients is “mechanically separated chicken”, but despite the ominous
sounding name, this is just a term for cheap and efficient practice that separates chicken
from the bone.
The trade off is that human workers are much more precise, so when the machine separates
your future hot dog meat from a chicken bone, it doesn't really care about all the gristle,
fat, and tendons you normally wouldn't eat.
The leftover trimmings that also get thrown into the hot dog pot are typically cuts of
meat left over from making the more choice steak cuts that are sold in the supermarket.
After separating an animal carcass into its choice cuts, there's plenty of smaller leftover
bits that wouldn't make sense to sell on their own, so into the grinder they go.
Along with these perfectly legitimate pieces of meat though go more questionable cuts which
we're willing to bet you'd never purposefully eat on their own, such as the meat from an
animal's head, lots of fat, and even more bits of sinew and tendon.
Food companies are no fool, so they grind this mess into a very unappetizing paste,
mixing in the good bits of meat with the... less than good bits of meat, into a meat puree.
That meat paste is then cooked thoroughly so as to kill all the bacteria it contains.
Then that tasty meat pudding is sent to a chopping chamber where it is finely chopped,
resulting in what's called an emulsion.
That finely chopped mess is once more put through a grinder, and finally through a sieve
to give it a more ground-beef type of feel.
At this point, every manufacturer adds different ingredients to its hot dog recipe.
Most however will include potassium lactate, a preservative which helps inhibit mold and
fungus growth.
The last thing you'd want is to bite into a delicious hot dog and get a mouthful of
mold.
Sodium Diacetate is also included in most ingredients list, because factory farming
is a literal hell hole of misery, cruelty, and other things you care more about like
germs and pathogens.
Rather than transition to a healthier, if slightly more expensive, method of farming,
sodium diacetate is dumped into the hot dog mixture to help kill deadly germs.
Hot dog meat, just like any other meat, quickly loses its appealing pink luster that lets
you know it's fresh and delicious- even when it's most definitely not fresh, and questionably
delicious.
That's where Sodium Nitrite comes to the rescue.
This additive helps hot dogs and other processed food products keep their delicious pink coloring
for longer, so that you don't think twice about buying that 7-11 hot dog that's definitely
been on that roller thingy for at least a month and a half now.
Sodium Phosphate pulls double duty in hot dog meat.
For a long time it was used to treat constipation and upset stomachs, but in processed meats
it's used to keep that meat nice and moist.
Nothing looks unhealthier than dry meat, and aesthetics are very important for consumers.
Unlike other chemical additives on our list though, at least sodium phosphate is already
working to help your inevitable constipation and upset stomach after eating a bunch of
hot dogs.
Everything else is pretty much just giving you cancer.
Along with chemicals, each hot dog brand has its own recipe for flavor.
This is also the stage where things like salt, sugar, and other spices are mixed into the
meat paste, giving the future hot dogs a distinctive, and branded flavoring.
Now that the hot dog meat is full of chemical additives and spices, the whole thing gets
another thorough mixing and then is pumped into plastic casings, which gives them their
tube shape.
The hot dogs, which finally look like proper 'dawgs, are then put into a giant cooker in
180 degree water for about 30 minutes.
After this very warm bath, the hot dogs are dumped into ice cold water in order to prevent
shriveling, then have their plastic cases removed and are packaged for your consumption.
Hot dogs are definitely a better food option than they were 120 years ago, but if you'd
like to eat more, well actual meat, and less 'filler', look for packaging that says things
like “all beef” or “all pork”, and avoid labeling that says “meat by-products”
or “variety meats”.
'Organic' is just a buzzword cooked up to sell you overpriced crap, so instead of relying
on labels do some research ahead of time on brands and their manufacturing processes,
because organic doesn't mean you aren't going to be eating a questionable hodge-podge of
animal bits and pieces.
At least though you can rest easy knowing that human meat is likely not part of the
recipe.
In 2015 food tests on popular hot dog brands showed that 2 percent of their samples contained
human DNA, but this was likely just hairs and fingernails accidentally dropped into
the hot dog batch by careless workers.
Not exactly comforting, but eating someone's ground-up fingernails is probably less gross
than eating their entire ground-up body.
Now that you're turned off hot dogs forever, check out our Challenge: I Ate Only Fast Food
For 30 Days.
Or click this other video instead!