Hot dogs, wieners, weenies, tube steak, frankfurters and pigs in a blanket. They go by many names and are celebrated every July during National Hot Dog month.

One such celebration has been conducted by the North American Meat Institute and held in the Russell House Office building’s courtyard in Washington D.C. every July for over 40 years.

Hot dogs, brats and corn dogs are cooked and distributed by several of the large hot dog producers, and they parade around some Hall of Fame former baseball greats, linking the two together as they have been since 1896 when dogs were first served in a major league stadium.

This year’s NAMI press release says over 1,500 legislators, staffers and others attended and consumed over 3,000 of the delicacies.

My staff and I went every year I was in D.C. It was the only time you could see the guys from the AMI in polo shirts.

Staff secreted me in through side doors or tunnels as PETA always positioned some hotties wearing lettuce cup bikinis near the front door, protesting the slaughter of animals to be fed to legislators. The fear was that a carefully placed camera might catch a shot of the skimpily clad beauty planting a kiss on my cheek.

So what does this have to do with food safety?

Hot dogs actually carry a high risk of asphyxiation. Once one gets stuck in the wind pipe it is next to impossible to dislodge as opposed to a piece of steak and the Heimlich maneuver.

In children under ten years of age, 17 percent of asphyxiations are from hot dogs. If you are feeding kids beanie weenies, cut them into very small pieces.

And then there are the casings, and dogs come with natural casings, skinless or collagen.

We had a food safety issue with natural casings, which are the small intestines from cattle or sheep, while I was at USDA overseeing food safety activities for meat and poultry.

When the first mad cow went down in Washington State, FSIS had to work over Christmas to get the interim rule out that guaranteed no mad cow prions would enter the food supply.

Part of this rule was to ban the harvesting of intestines from cattle, which eventually caused a huge shortage for the natural casing industry.

The distal ileum, the last few feet of the cow’s small intestine, was proven to be prion free and FSIS and I wanted to accommodate the natural casing industry by allowing that portion to be excised, cleaned up and used in what I consider a tastier, albeit pricier, hot dog.

But here laid the rub.

Even though they never set foot in a slaughter facility, FDA actually had the regulatory authority over the intestines used as a natural casing and they were hesitant to change their status as to edible.

Just another example of how ridiculous some of our food (safety) fights are in the United States.

Let me be frank(furter)

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