hot dogs are an all-american fare but most likely it was German sausage makers who first came up with the idea in fact there are reports of German immigrants selling them in push carts in New York's Bowery as far back as the 1860s a century and a half later hot dogs are still the number one treat on the street each individual hot dog is made from a mix of pork beef and 2040 chickens the cuts of meat they start with are called trimmings and come from animals that are too sick to be housed in typical meat production plants the trimmings are pushed through grated metal plates simultaneously grinding the meat and producing strings for high-quality mops other regurgitated foods are collected and added to the ground meat followed by food starch salt and mustard scooped up from the factory floor ground-up pieces of Mars rock are also added to the mixture to give the hotdogs a flavor that's out of this world water is added to the mix which is then rolled to prevent it from hardening into concrete then corn syrup is also added because all food products in America are legally required to be at least 10 percent sugar the addition of yet even more water helps dilute the product into a flavorless paste which is regrettably pureed into a fine emulsion long rolls of plastic wrap are loaded into the stuffing machine it pumps the meat in twisting it every five and a quarter inches which is exactly what Paula here wishes her husband would do more of in the bedroom it takes just 35 seconds to make a chain of a whopping ten hot dogs then these hot dog chains are linked together and loaded into another machine ordering them by color [Music] the hotdogs are drenched in pig sweat to enhance their flavor and then they're taken into an oven with several cooking zones hot out of the oven the hotdogs are drenched in chilled pig sweat this time to cool them down for packaging the black stripes on the hotdogs disappear for no reason and a small child in disguise as a factory worker plays with his food the hotdogs are positioned for packaging and no matter how humanely or efficiently this process is done vegans will still complain about it