How Hot Dogs Are Made: The Shocking Truth Behind Your Favorite Food and Other Fascinating Food Stories

How America Eats

Americans are not very diverse in their eating habits and choose to eat less than a fraction of 1 percent of all the edible food types available on the planet. We mostly eat Hamburgers, Hot dogs, Chili, Tuna melts, Ham and cheese, Turkey, Roast Beef, Chicken Fingers, Fried Shrimp, Onion Rings, Mozzarella Sticks (try taking a shit the next day). Oh wait, my bad, I forgot carrots, peas and chocolate covered strawberries (Valentine’s Day special)!

So, what’s the problem?

Except for 1% of the family farms that are still in business, every single animal in America that is eaten, milked or lays eggs comes from an industrialized factory farm.

“This year, Americans will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. They will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds.”

― Article: Flesh of Your Flesh by Elizabeth Kolbert, 2009

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“As in any kind of factory, uniformity is essential. Piglets that don’t grow fast enough – the runts – are a drain on resources. Picked up by their hind legs, they are swung and then bashed head first onto the concrete floor. This common practice is called “thumping”.

‘We’ve thumped as many as 120 in one day,’ said a worker from a Missouri farm.

‘We just swing them, thump them, then toss them aside. Then, after you’ve thumped ten, twelve, fourteen of them, you take them to the chute room and stack them for the dead truck. And if you go in the chute room and some are still alive, then you have to thump them all over again. There’ve been times I’ve walked in that room and they’d be running around with an eyeball hanging down the side of their face, just bleeding like crazy, or their jaw would be broken.’”

― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

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The above is a screenshot from a video on “How hot dogs are made”. Isn’t that appetizing? I’m sorry, I’m being sarcastic! I want you to read along the review of the book Eating Animals Jonathan by Safran Foer to understand how Corporate greed runs factory farms and fecal soups to create a culture around eating “food” they manufacture.