It’s the End of the Hot Dog as We Know It

Are hot dogs KILLING YOUR CHILDREN?  News at eleven.

Apparently, they are — which has prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to release a new policy statement on choking prevention for children, recommending, among other things, changes in government oversight of food choking hazards, and asking food manufacturers to consider redesigning potentially dangerous food products, such as hot dogs and hard candies.

That’s right!  A redesign of the hot dog.  So it will look more like a… hot frog?  Mmmmm.

It’s actually no laughing matter; a child dies every five days in this country due to choking on food, and among those cases, hot dogs are the most common type of food.  The reasons for this are not hard to understand, as Dr. Gary Smith, lead author of the AAP policy statement, explains:

“If you were to take the best engineers in the world, and you said to them, ‘Design for me the perfect plug for a child’s airway,’ you couldn’t do better than a hot dog,” says Dr. Smith.

I have not eaten a hot dog since having an “incident” at Girl Scout camp (let’s just say they are NOT better the second time around), so a redesign isn’t going to make me shed any tears.

But what about Joey Chestnut?   Competitive eating with something shaped like a, say, hamburger will not be the same.  My god, what if a redesign forces him to return to the less prestigious deep-fried asparagus circuit?  Tragic!  I cannot imagine that Joey will be happy about this.  Not happy at all.