Hot dog sales must be directly proportional to beer sales in some way. It must be a mixture of chemicals, like alcohol and cocaine, which is far more addictive than either in isolation. One thing I find odd about these studies is where do the scientists get these rats and monkeys who are hooked on cocaine, and where do the rats and monkeys get their drugs from in the first place? Strangely enough, I have several theories about drug-distribution networks that generally mean I expect every taxi-driver, hot-dog seller and ski-rep to be able to provide illicit narcotics to all and sundry. Maybe it’s renegade zoo-keepers who get these monkeys hooked as they travel from cage to cage.
I’ve read Fast Food Nation, and when given big letters and lots of repetition in large font, I can figure out what to think. Interestingly enough, the book talks about the chain-mail gloves that workers in meat-packing factories get to protect themselves from knives which the workers ‘often don’t have time to sharpen’. It doesn’t say anything about people in London with stanley knives. Maybe someone should write a book about people carving their hands to pieces in urban settings to help educate over-educated, under-sensed DIY enthusiasts.
One thing I did take from the book was that companies like McDougals actually get the best beef due to their purchasing power, and everyone buying burgers for home consumption is actually getting the bits of faeces that the over-worked meat packers don’t manage to stop falling from the skins onto the carcasses as they whizz past. Probably too busy cooking sirloins in the knife sterilisers to do that.
None of this is relevant to your standard sausage though, which is invariably made of lips and arseholes. But they are addictive, not that I’d claim, under normal circumstances, to being an expert sausage-eater, salami muncher, or sausage jockey.