At one point in your life — namely childhood, but perhaps more recently — hot dogs probably represented a significant part of your diet. And why not? They’re delicious, convenient, and relatively inexpensive. They’re also versatile and can be cooked in a variety of ways: If you want to fire up the grill, go ahead — and if you want to eat your hot dogs straight out of the package, you can actually do that, too (mostly). It’s clear that hot dogs are a popular part of American cuisine, but the actual number consumed on average — per person, per year — in the U.S. is staggering. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC), it’s about 70.
If that number seems a little extreme, then you clearly haven’t been doing your part (though the good people of West Virginia — the U.S. state that consumes the most hot dogs — certainly are). But if you really stopped and thought about it, you’d probably realize you ate more in the last year than you initially believed. If you went to any cookouts during the summer, saw a baseball game, or used leftover hot dogs to bulk up the ultimate cheesy comfort dish — mac and cheese — all of it contributes to the estimated 20 billion hot dogs Americans eat, in total, each year (per NHDSC).
How hot dogs became so beloved in America
America is a country of immigrants, including Germans, whose population in the U.S. surged in the 1800s due to economic hardships in the motherland. These people had been eating sausages for 300 years before coming stateside, and they not only continued that tradition — they started selling them to others. Charles Feltman was among the first, hawking hot dogs at his Coney Island stand in 1871. Twenty-two years later, the Chicago World’s Fair brought in 27 million people to see its wondrous sights and to eat its mouth-watering offerings, including beef sausages.
Around the same time hot dogs became a popular snack at the World’s Fair, these meat tubes were also being served up in ballparks, while German vendors spread out across the country, further exposing more and more Americans to savory sausages. By the mid-1910s, a rival to Charles Feltman had emerged — one Nathan Handwerker, founder of Nathan’s Famous hot dogs — and he held the now-famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, forever associating the food with this summertime holiday. Then, in 1939, hot dogs proved to be a royally delicious choice when President Franklin D. Roosevelt offered one to the English king at the time — and it was a hit. Proving that they were good enough for royalty, hot dogs started appearing more widely in grocery stores the next year, and the rest, as they say, is history.
