#1023 Corndog Culture

In a new book about the end of overeating, the author says the reason we overeat is that we’re addicted to some of the things we eat. He proposes we can’t just diet, we have to rehab our whole digestive tract. Actually we have to deprive our bodies of the rush we get from three main drugs—sugar, salt, and fat.
If you’re like me, you’ve cut down on one or the other. But American food purveyors and creators have made an effort to combine those ingredients in every popular food. That’s why they’re popular.
Think of the great food we love this time of year, fair food. Fair food is the summer equivalent of the groaning tables of indoor food we have during the winter holiday season.
Except in summer, we don’t carve a turkey breast. We heft a deep-fried turkey leg. Forget the pumpkin and pecan pies. It’s time for scones and elephant ears. How about those Jello marshmallow dishes? Strawberry shortcake. Mashed potatoes and gravy? Potato skin nachos.
Gravy and melted cheese sauce both enjoy the benefits of lots of salt and smooth finger-licking runniness.
Summertime also gives us the one food that is the epitome of American culinary culture. The corndog. Think of it as the pure heroin of the fast food hard drug spectrum.
First you take ground up bits of meat products you wouldn’t otherwise eat—lips, sphincters, ligaments, tendons, and nameless organs. Mix it all up and add lots of spices, salt, and sugar. Add chemicals, nitrates, nitrites, and various preservatives. Then stuff the meat into an intestinal tube.
Then you dip it in batter. The batter contains some arguably healthy ground up corn. Corn, the grain that masquerades as a vegetable. Add more sugar and salt to the batter and a little cholesterolly milk and egg to bind it to the corn meal.
Then deep-fry it in a hot bubbly vat of fat.
And the coop de grease, and American ingenuity at its best, put a stick in it to make it easy to gobble with one hand.
So your other hand can hold that salty, sweet, nut-topped, chocolate waffle cone.
Drugs anyone?
America, ya gotta love it.