The INSIDER Summary:
- Hot dogs are associated with the Fourth of July.
- The association has been promoted by Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, held on Independence Day every year.
- The official history of the event is riddled with falsehoods.
- The first contest was held in 1972, not 1916, and it wasn't even on Independence Day.
- Nonetheless, hot dogs have maintained a historical significance in American culture.
Americans eat 150 million hot dogs each year on the Fourth of July. That's enough hot dogs to make a line from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles five times.
Why? The tradition of eating hot dogs on Independence Day was inspired by a gut-churning annual event: Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.
The contest, though, is shrouded in lies.
The hot dog hoax.
Every Independence Day, Nathan's Famous, a hot dog company, hosts an eating contest on Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York.
According to legend, it has hosted the competition almost every year on the Fourth of July since 1916.
"To settle an argument over who was the most patriotic, legend has it that four immigrants held a hot dog eating contest at our famous Coney Island stand,"Nathan's website says.
"The story that I have heard forever is that there were four immigrants arguing over who was the most American on the Fourth of July," the president of Major League Eating, which runs Nathan's hot dog eating competition, told Smithsonian magazine.
NBC, ESPN, and The New York Daily News all also uncritically cite the baloney story about the first contest being held in 1916.
There's even an elaborate, nonsensical backstory about the contest being canceled in 1941 "as a protest to the war in Europe" and in 1971 because of "civil unrest and the reign of free love,"as cited by multiple media outlets.
It's all a marketing stunt.
In fact, there is no evidence of Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest being held in any year before 1972.
Mortimer Matz, a longtime public relations professional, told The New York Times in 2010 the truth about the contest's backstory: He just made it up.
Matz told the Times, "We said this was an annual tradition since 1916. In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up."
In a 2016 interview with the Associated Press, former Nathan's president Wayne Norbitz owned up to the lie.
"Our objective was to take a photograph and get it in the New York newspaper,” Norbitz said. "We’d honestly wait for a couple of fat guys to walk by and ask them if they wanted to be in a hot dog contest."
The early 1970s contests weren't even always held on the Fourth of July. Ones in 1972, 1975, and 1978 were held on Memorial Day and Labor Day.
By the 1980s, Nathan's started hosting their contest on Independence Day regularly. And with that, it successfully tied the food to the holiday.
"We get hundreds of millions in PR value,"Norbitz told The Wall Street Journal. The original Nathan's stand on Coney Island sells 26,000 hot dogs alone on the day of the contest, according to the Journal.
George Shea, chair of Major League Eating, told INSIDER that he stands by his claim that the contest is 100 years old. Nathan's Famous did not immediately respond to INSIDER's request for comment.
America made the hot dog its own.
In order to successfully marry hot dogs and the Fourth of July, Nathan's needed to convince America that the hot dog is a uniquely American food. And in that sense, they're right.
"A hot dog belongs to the ancient family of encased foods," food historian and President-Emeritus of the Culinary Historians of Chicago, Bruce Kraig, writes in "Hot Dog: A Global History."
It's a member of the sausage clan, he explained, traced back to Germany at least as far back as the 1400s.
But the term "hot dog"— and the form of sausages we now call hot dogs — is American. In the 1800s, Germans emigrated to America in great numbers and brought sausage culture with them, Kraig writes. The first known use of the phrase "hot dog" comes from a September 28, 1893 edition of the Knoxville Journal: "Even the weinerwurst men began preparing to get the 'hot dogs' ready for sale Saturday night." The term referred to a sausage in a bun.
There are several urban legends about the American hot dog — a sausage in a bun — originating from sausage salesmen at baseball parks, or people eating them to stay warm on a cold day, and of a Bavarian man selling them at the 1904 world fair. Those are unsupported by evidence, Kraig says.
The term spread through the United States by German ethnic comedians, Kraig says. Many hot dog carts were decorated with dogs, and the joke was that the dog illustrations were memorials for the animals.
"Within a few years, the term 'hot dog' had spread to other eastern colleges and then seeped into popular culture. The reason was simple: It was a funny joke and accorded with topical humour. Cartoons depicting dogs being processed in sausage-making machines were fairly common in the 1890s. Shortly thereafter such gruesomely amusing pictures were joined by dogs being eaten in buns, or about to be eaten, fearful of being consumed, happy to be food, and so on."
As hot dog stands and carts became increasingly popular across America, so did the jokes about its name. And so did the different types of hot dogs popular among different cultures.
German Jews, for instance, popularized all-beef hot dogs because pork, usually used in sausages, isn't kosher. They also popularized mustard, pickle spears, and onion salt as add-ons. Chicago's sizable Greek population, in the first half of the 20th century, popularized green relish, sport peppers, and tomatoes as hot dog topping — all foods that are Mediterranean in origin. Greek and Balkan immigrants popularized a type of meat sauce topping on hot dogs, although the style was co-opted by Coney Island hot dog sellers and became what we now call "chili dogs." Hot dogs became the sort of food item everyone in America ate, and different hot dogs had different cultural spins given by different sorts of immigrants, making them uniquely American.
Today, there are even more styles. Some places in New England, Kraig writes, sell "chow chow dogs" with steamed lettuce, bacon, and cheddar cheese. You'll find hot dogs with spicy sauces in Rhode Island. Places in Central Georgia sell them with oyster crackers.
Hot dogs also obtained an American identity for business reason, argues Kraig. Hot dog stands were relatively inexpensive to open, were served in public spaces, and everyone ate them.
"The hot dog is one of the first foods to fill that role as a symbol of social unity," Kraig writes. "Hot dog stands attract people of all classes who stand together, elbow to elbow, some with jackets and ties, others in work dresses, eating their city's signature sausage."
Hot dogs are a major American export — and Nathan's knows it.
After obtaining an American identity, American-style hot dogs spread around the globe, Kraig writes. Many countries still have their own sausage traditions, like Germany and Poland, but you'll find "New York style" or "Chicago style" hot dogs everywhere.
It's hard to say exactly how many hot dogs are consumed each year. Americans purchase 350 million pounds of hot dogs at retail stores annually, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, but that figure doesn't include hot dogs sold as sports events and carnivals. Still, that's a lot of hot dogs. (By the way, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council says that hot dogs are not a sandwich.)
Nathan's uses the American symbolism to sell its hot dogs. ESPN's ratings for the hot dog eating contest exceed that of Major League Baseball games aired on the same day.
"It’s so popular that in certain parts of the US and certain parts of the world, people know Nathan’s because of the contest," Norbitz said. "The first thing they’ll say many times is 'Nathan’s, that’s the hot dog eating contest.'"
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