Every now and then, The Washington Post publishes something that provokes uniquely murderous rage from readers across the political spectrum. On May 24, that something was a recipe. For hot dogs. Made of carrots.

“If you show up to my cookout with carrot dogs I’m setting you on fire,” NFL blogger Lindsey OK tweeted, one of many threats of bodily harm made in response to Joe Yonan’s recipe for charred and steamed carrots, adapted from the Chubby Vegetarian cookbook. Golf Digest deemed the recipe a “despicable” and “horrid” idea that would “possibly ruin” Memorial Day Weekend. The conservative news show Fox and Friends aired a two-minute segment poking fun at the carrot dog, too, which featured host Pete Hegseth eating a raw carrot shoved between two buns. Ashley Nicole Black, who writes for the liberal comedy show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, also got in on the fun. “If you put a carrot inside a hot dog bun and call it a vegan hot dog, I will cut you,” she tweeted.

Yonan’s recipe clearly hit a nerve. “I was very surprised by the vehemence of the anger,” he told me, comparing the reaction to the infamous New York Times recipe for pea guacamole. “People felt personally assaulted by these carrot dogs, as if I was throwing them out of a cannon.” Criticisms were made not just of Yonan’s recipe but of Yonan himself for making it. “The lamestream media really does want America to hate them,” libertarian scholar Aaron Ross Powell wrote.

If eating “real” hot dogs makes you as angry and violent and inhospitable as some of the folks responding to @washingtonpost about the stellar @chubbyveg Carrot Dogs I made, I will count that as another reason I’m happy to be #vegetarian . @WaPoFood — Joe Yonan (@JoeYonan) May 25, 2018

On the one hand, America really loves hot dogs. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council says Americans consume around 20 billion hot dogs per year—about 7 billion from Memorial Day to Labor Day—and that sales remain steady due to the growing popularity of high-protein diets. “Experts believe sales of the entire refrigerated processed meat category will continue to grow in the future,” the Hot Dog Council claims, despite the rise of millennials concerned about the environmental impacts of factory farming and the health impacts of processed foods.

But liking the taste of processed meat doesn’t explain why people get so mad at suggested alternatives. That may have more to do with the hot dog’s longstanding place in American culture. “This is a food specifically geared to American patriotism,” says culinary historian Bruce Kraig, who has written two books about hot dog culture around the world. America’s hot dog patriotism did not occur by accident, he says, but by design: starting with an early national desire to distinguish America as a meat-eating (and therefore prosperous) country. It then spread like wildfire due to savvy advertisers who sought to capitalize on that desire.