Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs

WE NEED MORE WOMEN PRIESTS! a billboard declares a few miles outside of Buffalo, a new cursed addition to a folder in my Google Drive called 'feminism except not really.

Reader, it gives me no pleasure to inform you that behind me was a floor-to-ceiling display, museum, of Tony Packo’s–branded gender pickles—and no, not those gender pickles. There is a second brand of gender pickles, and they are even hornier. It absolutely wrenches my guts to let you know that after ordering the Hungarian hot dog, which I will foreshadow is terrific, I carefully inspected every aggressively anthropomorphized heterosexual pickle, pepper, sausage, and tomato. It makes me sick to know it is my duty as the sole chronicler of This Sort of Thing to disclose what I have learned. It feels awful to share that there appears to be a storyline to this wall of pickles and mustard, a love story I will retell as faithfully as possible. With deepest regrets, this is the story of how the Tony Packo’s pickle and the Tony Packo’s pepper fucked each other and had a baby.

The dog is grilled to a slight char, strangled in a strip of grilled bacon, and topped with diced tomato, onion (crude and fried), winnie (I cannot for the life of me figure out what this is), mayonnaise, mustard and—wait for it—beans. The sheer risk factor of beans on a hot dog

The most important question when examining any niche community is this: is anyone fucking? Who’s fucking? And if they’re fucking, how can I know more about the fucking? If this is your only takeaway from this book, I’ve still provided you with a doctoral education. There’s another secret: the answer is always yes. Someone is always fucking someone else with the same very specific profession as them; Whether your scanning the Olympic Village or backstage at the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.

And finally—if you’re standing in a big box store wondering if you should steal this book, the answer is yes.

The “ancestral sausage” goes back twenty thousand years to the Paleolithic era.

Hot dogs are the kind of American that you know there is something deeply wrong with but still find endearing.

I’ve seen all the signs: the neon signs; the distressed wooden signs; the all-lowercase, chic-font signs that tell you a quirky girl just got her trust fund and you’ll never believe what business she’s trying; the irrationally angry sign saying you’ll have to fucking wait a little longer because it would appear that the workers don’t feel like coming to work anymore.

the reality of factory farms is an integrated scheme to exploit everyone involved but those at the top—the animals are treated without mercy by underpaid employees, who in turn make an unhealthy product to be marketed to the poor, who consume and shorten their own lifespans by enjoying it.

A bun is a hammock and a corn dog casing is a crypt; do you see what I mean?

I want to consume and be consumed by the objects of my desire until they make me sick; I want to puke them back out and rearrange them like tea leaves.

There are certain things that remind me of my destiny to raw dog American capitalism, get the same UTI over and over, and keep going back out of shame and lack of prospects. I skew pretty left, but I will wait in line at Space Mountain for an hour and foam at the mouth over the intellectual property of one of the world's vilest conglomerates. Their labor and integration practices are sick, their refusal to produce anything new is obnoxious, and when I see a princess at a theme park who has the same hair color as me, I pass out.