• Hot dogs will be a part of many American picnics this July Fourth weekend.
  • Americans ate about 3.7 billion hot dogs in the 12 months ending May 2022, according to a research firm.
  • Federal regulations over the decades have tightened quality controls in meatpacking – and hot dog production.

We love hot dogs. But we’ve all heard those stories about what might go into them.

Do they contain scraps from the meatpacking plant floor, or pig snouts and other body parts – or even human DNA?

Upton Sinclair’s heralded exposé on the meat industry “The Jungle,” released as a novel in 1906, detailed how collected scraps from the floor – including meat, sawdust and anything else on the floor – were used in making sausages. The book led to federal meat inspection laws, which prohibited that practice.

As those laws were refined, tougher labelling standards required increasingly specific listings of ingredients in hot dogs and other processed meats. Any hot dog or sausage using organ meats – or other parts such as head meat, tongue, lips, snouts – must be labelled as including variety meats.

“Any ‘weird’ ingredient that is put into a product must be labeled as such to inform the consumer of the item,” said Jonathan Campbell, an associate professor and extension meat specialist at Penn State University. “It is impossible to make a high quality hot dog or frankfurter with sub-par raw materials.”

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Pig snouts and cheek meat and “other seemingly weird” meat ingredients may be used in making traditional products such as souse and head cheese, Campbell said. “These ingredients are clearly labeled on that product and are not put into sausages like a frankfurter,” he said.

And experts challenged the 2015 report that found human DNA in 2% of the 345 samples as likely shoddy research. “It’s just unfounded,” said Davey Griffin, professor and meat specialist for the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service. “Even in small plants, you don’t touch anything without gloves on.”

We love our hot dogs

As inspection and quality control standards increased, hot dogs became a menu mainstay in kitchens and ballparks – and earned an exalted place at cookouts and gatherings on holidays such as the Fourth of July.

Americans ate about 3.7 billion hot dogs in the 12 months ending May 2022, according to The NPD Group, a research firm. Most of those – 3.1 billion – are eaten at home, NPD says.