I was researching summer trivia for an event I was leading when I discovered this fun factoid: Americans eat 150 million hot dogs on the Fourth of July. I started thinking about that number and looked up the U.S. population in 2024. It’s 342 million, which means on Independence Day, almost every other person you know probably ate a hot dog, if this statistic is correct.
Frankly, I know plenty of people who hate hot dogs. If we toss in vegetarians, babies, people watching their sodium intake, folks who don’t eat pork for religious reasons or, someone like me, who ate a hot dog the day before the holiday and figured I shouldn’t push my luck with two in one week, it’s hard to imagine 150 million getting devoured in one day.
I decided to do more digging on the dogs, and according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (wouldn’t it be fun to attend one of their meetings?) Americans eat an average of 818 hot dogs a second between Memorial Day and Labor Day, with more than 20 billion consumed annually. That works out to 58 hot dogs for every man, woman and child in America. Gulp! Divide that by 12 months and that’s almost five dogs a month for everyone. If you hang around the Costco food court on any given day, you’ll see plenty of people enjoying the $1.50 special, so maybe we really do eat that many after all.
I’ll confess I haven’t been doing my part to help achieve these numbers, but luckily the competitive eaters who participate in the annual Nathan’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest are taking up my slack. This year, the champion in the men’s division managed to eat 58 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes for his first-ever Mustard Belt win, while the female winner broke the women’s division record by eating 51 and achieving her 10th championship. There are rumblings of cheating in the men’s division, which makes me wonder if you can get banned from the sport of competitive eating. It’s odd to consider eating a sport in the first place, but if you’d asked me in junior high gym class if I wanted to play volleyball or see how many hot dogs and buns I could eat in 10 minutes, I’d probably have picked the latter.
I remember a car commercial in the mid-1970s patriotically touting “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet” and while I couldn’t find a definitive answer online about hot dogs arriving in America, I know they have German ancestors, and have been around since the 13th century, where they were supposedly served at imperial coronations and known as wiener würtschen. When they showed up in America, the bun hadn’t been invented yet. Depending on which story you believe, the bun was launched after a concessionaire at the New York Polo Grounds in 1901 ran out of wax paper and started using French rolls. Or in 1880, a street vendor in Missouri used to include gloves so his customers could handle the hot sausages without getting their fingers burned. He got tired of losing money by not getting his gloves back so he started serving his sausages in a roll. Either way, good old American ingenuity took it up a notch by inventing an edible carrying case, giving us more space to slather on the condiments. Imagine carrying a hot dog covered in mustard, onions, pickle relish, and maybe some sauerkraut around in a glove and then returning it when you were done eating. I sure wouldn’t want that glove back.
And then someone got clever, put a stick in the middle of a hot dog, dipped it in pancake batter and declared it was a Pronto Pup, or in cornmeal batter and christened it a Corn Dog. Or if you’re Canadian, a Pogo. “What’s a pogo?” I asked Mike early in our marriage when he mentioned he was craving one. He rolled his eyes, shocked that I had no idea. “A hot dog on a stick dipped in batter,” he said. “You mean a Corn Dog?” I asked. “No, I mean a Pogo,” he said. “Ketchup or mustard?” I asked. “Mustard, of course,” he said. I nodded my head vigorously in agreement. “Only mustard.” Just one of the many reasons we’re still married.