Hot Dog: Origins

What our love of specious food origin stories says about us.

Everyone loves a good origin story.

Hollywood sure knows this. There’s no better way to prop up a sagging superhero franchise a little while longer than to sneak in a prequel that establishes the hero’s journey to the already-familiar present. Heck, more often that not, movie studios will simply pull the plug, reboot, and tell the story again. Between 1989 and 2022, a full 8.2% of major movie studio budgets was dedicated to murdering Bruce Wayne’s parents. [citation needed]

Perhaps nowhere is a cleverly-crafted origin story more popular than in food, though. Our culinary history is full of apocryphal and barely-plausible-sounding stories of how now-ubiquitous foods came to be discovered, usual involving some cinema-worthy moment of truth:

The Earl of Sandwich was a degenerate gambler, and he refused to leave the card table long enough to eat. He demanded that his meat be placed between two pieces of bread so that he could continue gambling whilst also eating!

Potato chips were invented w…