hot dog – Life In A Word

Food-and-Drink – Eternally Linked

In the proverbial question of the chicken or the egg, the operative word is or. One came first or the other came first – not both. Same with the game of chess; you choose to be the black or the white, not every piece on the board. And the song you selected this morning to begin your morning commute? It was one of your favorites, not two (unless you found a mashup). So it boggles my find to discover, at Costco of all places, you can have a hot dog and a soda… just not or. It’s food and drink – or it’s nothing at all.

It’s been a while since I’ve shopped at Costco, so last Sunday’s visit felt like more than just a battle for space in the aisles. Featured items seemed new and interesting and the free samples beckoned more than usual. My wife and I go to Costco for paper goods, produce, wine, and not much else, so we made it to check-out sooner than most, but there was still a pretty good line of people. While we waited, I realized Costco is savvy with its store layout. Approaching the cashier, you face… the food court. On this day, the court was b-u-s-y, with just about every seat taken.

I never ever patronize the food court at Costco (I like to think I lean healthier) but something triggered my brain this time around. Just after July 4th a local radio host commented how “Costco hot dogs are the best, and believe me, I know hot dogs.” Suddenly a Costco hot dog sounded pretty good! So I asked my wife to stay in line while I pursued our spur-of-the-moment lunch. A lot of people were standing by the counters (looking nothing like a line) and I realized they were already waiting for orders. You see, at Costco you self-order on a computer screen – just touch the picture of the food or drink you want and insert a credit card.

Pepperoni pizza. Hot turkey and provolone sandwich. “Chicken bake”. Caesar salad. Hot dog and a soda. Ice cream. Those are pretty much your choices at Costco. The menu isn’t big and it’s certainly not your dietician’s recommendation, but it’s what the average Costco patron wants. Just not this patron. Not quite.

You Costco regulars already know this. A hot dog and a 20 oz. soda at the food court is only $1.50. Always has been and purportedly always will be. But here’s the rub. The computer screen doesn’t offer a picture of a hot dog. You’ll only find a hot dog with a soda. But there’s also a soda without a hot dog. In what world of logic does this make sense? I want a hot dog, Costco sells hot dogs, but I can only have one if I buy a 20 oz. soda as well. But I don’t want a soda…

This quickly became a matter of principle (as you might expect). I mean, $1.50 is reasonable for a hot dog so why not just go for the combo and throw away the empty soda cup, right? Yeah, I wish it were that easy for me. I challenged a couple of Costco employees about it back in the checkout line, and both said, “That’s the way it’s always been. It’s a nod to tradition. They’ll never change the price and they’ll never unlink the hot dog and the soda”. When I pointed out that, hey, you could buy a soda on its own (but not a hot dog on its own), that made them pause. A little.

Scold me now, please. There’s a war going on in Eastern Europe. Food and gas prices are through the roof. The U.S. is experiencing one of its hottest summers in decades with states forced into rolling blackouts. Meanwhile, I’m pitching fits because I can’t buy a hot dog all by itself at Costco.

Fittingly, you get the last laugh. My wife and I pulled out of the Costco parking lot and still had a taste for a hot dog, and the only place we could think of was a little sports bar in my mother-in-law’s neighborhood. So we go there and I order a hot dog with fries while my wife opts for the bratwurst with Tater Tots. (and yes, for those of you keeping score I could’ve ordered this hot dog all by itself). Then the cashier rings up the order and says, “That’ll be $30.00” (not $1,50, not $3.00 – thirty bucks). And how was my hot dog? Delicious, actually. I’d have the same thing again nex time. I just need to stop thinking about how I could’ve had twenty Costco hot dogs (and a bunch of empty soda cups) for the same price.

Tale of the Little-Dog

When my son and his wife visited with their daughters last week, the consensus for dinner was hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. These choices were noteworthy in that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate a hot dog. Sweet Italian sausage? A couple of times a month cut up into a stir-fry of vegetables. Beer brats? Also delicious, hot off the grill with a little mustard. But a hot dog is child’s play by comparison. Or should I say, a “dachshund sausage”?

It’s true. The Germans, who by all accounts can take credit for the invention of the hot dog (five hundred years ago!) nicknamed their frankfurters “dachshunds” – or “little-dog” sausages because, well, they looked exactly like the dog breed. The only history Americans claim is the re-nickname “hot dog”. Even the hot dog bun – which really took hold at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 – points back to the Germans, who always ate their sausages with bread.

Are hot dogs a staple in your diet, or like me are they simply a distant memory? If they weren’t hot off the grill in the backyard or at a summer picnic, perhaps you had one at a baseball game (but not so much football or basketball, go figure). You’ve probably also seen hot dogs on the midway at carnivals and county fairs. Wherever you get your franks today, they’re just not as likely to come from established restaurants.

In the 1970s, America seemed to have hot dog stands on every corner. The most popular of these was the distinctive drive-thru Der Wienerschnitzel’s, but you also had – at least from my California-based memory – Pup ‘N’ Taco, Ben Franks, Tail o’ the Pup, and the walk-up Hot Dog on-a-Stick booths you’d find at amusement parks. Today’s retail hot dog is at a Sonic Drive-In or the food court at Costco. If you live anywhere near New York’s Coney Island, you can also include “Nathan’s Famous”, or at least the annual hot dog eating contest of the same name.

A hot dog may be “a cooked sausage eaten in a long, soft piece of bread”, but its secondary meanings are less definitive. “Hot Dog!” is something you used to say when you were VERY happy about something else (“used to”, meaning sixty or seventy years ago). A “hot dog” is also a person “who makes fast, skillful movements in skiing, snowboarding, or surfing to make people notice them”. That last definition still stands.

Speaking of “used to say”, we also used to sing about hot dogs, didn’t we? Oscar Mayer’s jingle convinced us we should BE hot dogs (so everyone would be in love with us). But the better song came from Armour, which asked us what kind of kids eat Armour hot dogs? Per the lyrics, “…fat kids, skinny kids, kids that climb on rocks… tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox…” Today’s version of the Armour jingle would probably be censored just for using the word “kids”.

“I wish I had a million dollars. HOT DOG!” (Courtesy of Paramount Pictures and “It’s A Wonderful Life”)

Hot dogs will always be a childhood memory more than a dietary preference in my book. My mother, raising five hungry boys, developed several dinner recipes when time and ingredients were in short supply. These included canned baked beans and weenies (two ingredients = dinner!), and a truly odd creation from the Betty Crocker cookbook made up of hot dogs, mashed potatoes, and cheese (three ingredients!). Whether it tasted good or not – I honestly can’t remember – dogs, mash, and cheese conveniently covered the protein, carb, and fat categories, all in one broiler-blasted casserole.

My most vivid childhood hot dog memories are not the dinners mentioned above. Instead, I can’t forget snacking on raw hot dogs from the refrigerator (which sounds awful now, but hey, I was a kid). My mother was faithful to the Oscar Mayer brand so I ate a lot of their hot dogs raw. Speaking of Oscar Mayer, here’s the better memory. They built a motorized advertisement which to this day may be the coolest vehicle on wheels. The “Wienermobile” cruised the streets of Los Angeles, stopping every now and then in a parking lot so you could view it up close. The driver handed out tiny plastic replicas of the vehicle, appropriately labeled “Weenie Whistles”.

(Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures and “The Santa Clause”)

Let me conclude with a solved hot dog mystery. Your grocery store sells most brands in packages of ten. They also sell hot dog buns but in packages of eight. Why? Because hot dogs weigh about 1.6 ounces, which makes a package of ten a convenient sale of exactly one pound of meat. On the other hand, hot dog buns are baked in trays of four, which work best with conveyor belts and processing. An odd number of buns – trays of five – is a model of inefficiency. So until one or the other manufacturer changes their standard, you’ll always have leftovers for snacks. Or better yet, for your dog.

The hot dogs I served my granddaughters last week were comically advertised as healthy: no fillers, no preservatives, and so on. They weren’t very good. Maybe the worst part of a hot dog is what makes it taste so good? Or maybe hot dogs have simply lost their appeal to me? No, wait, that can’t be true. Anything my granddaughters ask me to eat has instant appeal.

Guess I haven’t eaten my last little-dog sausage just yet.

Some content sourced from the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC) website, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Ketchup Catch-Up

At the Communion rail in our pre-COVID, in-person church days, my wife and I would sometimes laugh at the size of the hunk of bread they’d tear off the loaf. The pieces were so big I’d often be chewing all the way back to my seat (and think I should’ve asked for seconds). On the other hand, today’s “drive-in church” Communion amounts to hermetically-sealed plastic capsules handed gingerly through the car window. Peel back the plastic to reveal the tasteless wafer and half-swallow of grape juice inside. No, it’s not breakfast by any definition, but at least we’re still achieving the higher purpose.

Communion and ketchup are strange bedfellows but I’m about to explain why they belong in the same sentence. If you’ve followed the headlines lately, you know – just below the latest details of the Myanmar conflict – we’re all worried about whether there’ll be enough ketchup packets for our next take-out meal. That’s right, the world is currently lacking in – not ketchup – but ketchup packets. If we don’t address the situation soon, buildings will burn and looting will run rampant. Even worse, we might have to top everything with mustard instead.

It’s the pandemic to blame, of course. As soon as traditional sit-down restaurants shifted to pick-up and delivery, their demand for packeted condiments jumped up to the level of Wendy’s and McDonald’s. In fact, Wendy’s and McDonald’s removed ketchup packets from their front counters, not because customers were taking too many, but because other restaurants were raiding their supplies. Yep, it’s gotten that kind of desperate out there in burger land.

Heinz, the undisputed king of ketchup, recently committed to increasing packet production by 25% to fend off potential mayhem in the streets. 125% of Heinz’s typical annual production amounts to, well… let’s just say there’d be enough to place a packet in the hand of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Dang. That’s a whole lot of processed tomato spread.

Speaking of processed tomato spread, here’s my favorite ingredient in ketchup: mustard (powder). It’s true. Go check the ingredients list on the bottle I know you have in your refrigerator.

But I digress. Let’s get back to the global packet shortage. Call me highbrow but I’m having a hard time caring, because honestly I can’t remember the last time I used a ketchup packet. The restaurants of my choosing always bring the bottle to the table when you ask for it. Furthermore – burgers aside – I don’t have a lot of use for ketchup. Not on my fries, not on my meatloaf, neither eggs nor hash browns. And while we’re at it can we all agree: mustard only on a bratwurst or a hot dog? It should be a cardinal rule.

But I digress… again. FOCUS!

If I don my eco-friendly hat for a moment (and don’t I look sharp?), the last thing I want to hear about is Heinz upping ketchup packet production to 12 billion a year. That sounds like enough plastic to Ziploc a small country many times over. But I get it. In these times of please-pass-the-virus (or better yet, don’t), we demand individually wrapped one-and-done solutions. Like ketchup packets. Like Communion elements.

Good things come in small packages, so the saying goes. Yeah, well, they come in big packages too. Like ketchup from a bottle instead of a plastic packet. Like Communion from a loaf of freshly baked bread instead of hole-punched from a sheet of Styrofoam. And seriously, who uses just one ketchup packet? Picture a baby burger you can balance between your finger and thumb and maybe it’s enough. Anything larger and you’re grabbing packets by the handful.

Let’s wrap this topic on a personal note. If ketchup packets disappear, my granddaughters won’t understand a really good bedtime story, the kind where they’ll giggle every time they talk about it. You know the story, the one where my buddies and I pocket ketchup packets from our school lunch trays, take ’em out to the playground asphalt, and stomp on ’em to give some unsuspecting kid a tomato facewash? Oh please, drop the mock horror. You know you were out there on the playground too, doing the very same thing.

Some content sourced from the 4/8/2021 CNN.com article, “America is facing a ketchup packet shortage”.