Holy Cow!

The costume, comedy & competition of the hotdog

My favorite part of riding this flowstate (sometimes achieved when I’m following my creative instincts to the fullest) is when everything I encounter starts seeming to connect. Case in point: the minute I decided a good couple’s Halloween costume for myself and my new Japanese beau would be recreating the absurdly gross Netflix Labor Day special “Unfinished Beef” reunion of hotdog-eating champions and longtime nemeses Joey Chestnut and Takeru “Kobi” Kobayashi, the world just started offering up food competitions/hotdog references on a binge-worthy comedic platter.

October was the Month of the Hotdog, a strange time for a pescatarian (and what a hazing for the new special friend), but survivable when the meats are fake.

Presenting the foam dog on a pillowy memory foam bun.

WHEN COWS DIE

When SNL gets a crew together to reenact some warped version of something somewhat historic like George Washington camping with his troops and giving them a pep talk about why our nation will proudly deny the clean logic of metric, or Christopher Columbus reporting back to the King of Spain (Bad Bunny) of his errant travels, it’s just instant classic gold. Or in this recent case, George again, this time crossing the Delaware and listing off all the many linguistic accidents that define our culture, like it or not:

I am fearful as well, but we will live through this battle ahead because we fight to control our own destiny, to create our own nation, and to do our own thing with the English language.

“Our own thing with the English language” includes such amusing inanities as: how we keep two names for animals, alive vs. dead as food, such as cows that become beef when we eat them, pigs that become pork, and chickens…that stay chickens. We fight for the right to have words that can be spelled two ways such as Jeff with a J or “the dumb way with a G,” donut or doughnut. Other foods we will create and name whatever we want, like hamburgers (not ham, “if it were only that simple”), buffalo wings for chicken, and hotdogs oh hotdogs… Says the General in a boat with his tricorn crew:

But fear not, men. A hotdog will not be made of dogs.

_What is it made of sir?

Nobody knows.

_But sir, shouldn’t we know what’s in a hotdog?

Get out.

[Man forced to jump out of boat into the water quickly complies]

A real American would never want to know what’s in a hotdog.

HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE

The General insists we shouldn’t ask what happens behind the grizzly scenes of the sausage factory, but if you really need to know and don’t consider yourself an authority-following sheep→lamb, it’s not as much meat as all the trimmings:

The Humane League says:

Hot dogs are made from the emulsified meat trimmings of chicken, beef, or pork. This meat mixture is blended with other ingredients (like preservatives, spices, and coloring) into a batter-like substance. The emulsified meat is then stuffed into casings, which are typically made from processed collagen or collagen from animal intestines.

[Insert insane list of ingredients]

Trimmings—a term that can mean bits of beef, pork, or chicken—are the primary ingredient in hot dogs. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC), trimmings are “most commonly pieces of meat cut away from steaks or roasts.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) gets a bit more specific, reporting that for raw-cooked meat products like hot dogs, “the muscle meat, fat, and non-meat ingredients are first processed raw by grinding, chopping, and mixing. The resulting viscous batter is portioned in sausages or loaves and then subjected to heat treatment, which causes protein coagulation, a firm-elastic texture, palatability, and some degree of bacterial stability.”

And to think, I used to assume “trimmings” were the sauces and sides at Thanksgiving. In this dirty vein of exploring the unsavory how-tos, I was inspired by a very visual October post I read from one of my new favorite Substacker’s

JENOVIA'S WEB

, who wasn’t content just decorating her house with a standard-variety naked skeleton, but had to customize the fake bones into a bloody mess called Mildred, complete with…a set of dentures she inserts. I too must outline the steps of making our costumes; the good people need to know.

First, the gory Netflix special. In a mere 10 minutes, padded by plenty of pregame fluff (including a slurpy watermelon-eating challenge and chicken wings on the patio), Chestnut won with 83 dogs gulped down with water in about two-to-three bites each, complete with buns, compared to Kobi’s 66. Since, as the non-Asian, I was going to be playing the role of the Champion, in my version my stomach would remain intact—if bloated enough to be pregnant in appearance, and Kobi, poor Kobi—we decided for the sake of Halloween hilarity—would be the Loser whose guts exploded.

Here’s my gallery WikiHow on turning this whack idea into two costumes:

Paint shirt; use foam and memory foam to assemble dogs and buns, then paint; glue bun and dog bits into clear bowl; use spray foam to create intestines coming out of bowl holes; belt bowls around body and rip shirts to expose them; glue bits of gunk onto shirt and glue itself to look like wet drool; play!

You know you’ve succeeded in life when people come up to you at the party and ask where are they serving those hotdogs. There was no award, but we both felt like winners.

THE SICKNESS

Not wanting to know what’s in your meat is as American as stuffing yourself with hotdogs on the celebration of our national independence or watching two lunatics do so to disgusting extremes at Coney Island. Ironically, how we ended up with this “Unfinished Beef” show to begin with was Chestnut being banned from competing in the classic Brooklyn contest (hosted by Nathan’s hotdogs) he won 16 times prior because he insisted on repping a different brand of dog, Impossible Foods meatless franks. Nonetheless, the dogs they consumed on the Netflix stage were indeed all-beef, as the contents of these contests always have been.

This is the first time I ever forced myself to watch a hotdog contest on TV or otherwise—for the sake of research!—and I’m fine never watching another. It did remind me though how I once went to a tugboat festival along the Hudson, and dockside there was a spinach-eating contest, whereby, a la Popeye, contestants had to consume their entire wet cans of spinach including the pools of green water before rotating their empty bowls on their heads when done. That feels sweet and healthy in retrospect compared to what is effectively glorified bulimia.

I say this because the secret part of these contests that they—hopefully—don’t show on TV is the part when, however long after the event, the contestants finally get to retreat to their own private spaces where they will likely throw it all up. If they don’t, they might actually combust, or at least experience extreme distress/discomfort for many hours/days. While these two major extreme eaters attest that they just use the toilet in the regular way ASAP, this Time.com article “What Competitive Eating Does to the Body,” itemizes the health risks in great detail from mouth to anus, and has Tim Janus, a competitive eater who quit after 11 years, admitting that “throwing up after the contest is a necessary part of the sport.”

Even the show documents how Kobi had to go on sabbatical for a while since his jaw stopped working. They show the men leading up to the event, who look fit if somehow still sickly, training by doing neck exercises, guzzling gallons of water, and of course downing dogs like crazy. The Time article describes how the art of competitive eating involves strengthening your jaw, desensitizing the gag reflex (vomiting midway will disqualify you and choking of course can result in death), expanding the stomach over time with increasing amounts of consumption, the extreme pliability of which might eventually bypass the usual message to the brain that they are full. After some minutes of bingeing, the competitor might start sweating profusely as the stomach can’t help but start pushing unprocessed food—and tons of glucose—into the small intestine.

One issue is that way too much glucose—the broken down form of all those hot dogs, especially their buns—could get dumped into the small intestine, Dr. David Metz [a retired professor of gastroenterology at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the effects of speed-eating] explains. The influx would send the body into panic mode as it seeks to avoid organ damage. This stress response, known as “dumping syndrome,” involves heavy sweating, rapid heartbeat, nausea, and diarrhea.

Bits of underchewed, undigested hotdog can stir bacterial growth in the small intestine that can also lead to more of the above symptoms and, on occasion: a five-day hospital stay. Long-term risks include: never feeling full again with “permanently-expanded” stomachs, something Kobi says he struggles with. Or, gastroparesis, defined with some literary flair here by Hopkins Medicine:

Gastroparesis, also called gastric stasis, occurs when there is delayed gastric emptying. Delayed gastric emptying means the stomach takes too long to empty its contents. Sometimes, when the food doesn’t empty properly, it forms a solid mass called a bezoar. Although bezoars had magical powers in the Harry Potter books, usually these big masses of old food can block the stomach and lead to symptoms of nausea, vomiting and even obstruction of the stomach, which in turn may prevent food from passing into the small intestine.

Since I have to continue on this tangent for a moment, according to HarryPotter.Fandom (which I do not remember from the books),

A bezoar was a stone-like mass taken from the stomach of a goat, that acted as an antidote to most poisons, with Basilisk venom being one notable exception. This was the reason why bezoars were used in the preparation of the Antidote to Common Poisons. This object was usually made of hair, plant fibre, or similar indigestible matter that stayed in the gut of an animal and formed a hard ball or “stone.” Bezoars were also notably rare, according to Horace Slughorn, who cited this as the reason why it was still worth knowing how to mix antidotes.

Bezoars. Then of course there’s heart disease and diabetes. That said, many of these eaters claim health better than most, and some have lived long lives, making up for these nasty competitions by swinging far the other way with what they eat and how they live the rest of the time with their muscles and veggies.

Still, I’m not convinced this is a worthy sport or worthy watching, much like I have a problem with football and its concussion culture. But in skits, sure! SNL had another relevant October bit I came upon in the very same show as Washington and the hotdogs. A Mile High Burger Challenge:

In Smitty’s Burger garage, a brave soul is attempting the Mile High Burger Challenge. I hope you got a stomach of steel, cause you’re taking on this 95 ounce burger behemoth accompanied by Mama Smitty’s one and only jumbo cherry chocolate shake.

_I ordered the Mile High burger but I just thought it’d be an ode to Denver like there’d be an egg on it. I’m not doing this. I’m sorry.

Okay well, if you do finish it under ten minutes, the grand prize is a trip for two to Hawaii.

And she’s off, as her tablemates try to continue their family meeting about dad’s dementia. There’s a moment where one asks what she and her mate are doing. The eater’s partner says, “I’m soaking the buns, Joey Chestnut style.” (But a new way might be no soaking, as evidenced on the Netflix, which Joey said he loved. Drinking cups of water vs. the classic bunsoak was a game-changer for him.)

In any case, at five minutes they ring the bell and the beef-eater is told she can’t use her hands anymore, creating one of those great SNL moments where some of the cast breaks and can’t help but laugh.

But is this funny? Or just so bezoar. SNL is as old as me (a member of the 50+ club now), so in this sense, I feel protective of its well-being and nutrition.

Another staggering bit from the Humane League site: each dog, with all the trimmings and other dangerous preservative ingredients like nitrates, takes more than a half an hour off your life.

If this sounds grim, it should: a recent study indicates that eating hot dogs and processed meats can reduce a healthy lifespan by about 36 minutes for every hot dog you eat.

Hot-diggity-dog—that’s an expensive snack.