We’ve all seen them, and chances are good most people have actually eaten them… the ubiquitous Vienna Sausage.

I gotta be honest, the name Vienna sausage sounds a bit too fancy for these gelatinous packed sawed off hot-dog wannabes, I like a phrase that author Taylor Anderson uses in his Destroyerman alternative reality books… Scum Weenies.

I’ve seen several prepping pantries with cases of Vienna sausage cans tucked away in them, so I thought I would consider if they were worthy prepping food. To do so, let’s list the pros and cons, as well as the neutrals.

Let’s start with the bullet lists.

Vienna Sausage Pros:

Canned

Light

Portable

Ready to eat, but can be cooked

Quick food

Long storage life

Inexpensive

Easy to stock in quantity

Filling

Well …. it’s probably gluten free, if that helps ya.

Could be eaten in place of salt tablets when working outside on a hot day?

Vienna Sausage Neutrals:

You may or may not like the taste

Long but not indefinite shelf life

You have to eat them before they go bad

Moderately bulky for their calories

Vienna Sausages Negatives:

Nutritionally abysmal

Likely to throw a person with hypertension into an acute blood pressure spike: ALL the salt!

Heaven only knows what parts of the chicken they are “mechanically separating”

Your arteries harden by just looking at them (i.e. they about as far from heart-healthy as you can get)

In daily life

In daily life, it would be hard to call Vienna Sausages health food. In an average can, 77 percent of the calories comes from fat, 5 percent carbs and 19 percent protein. One scum weenie is 37 calories, and an average 4 ounce can contains 260 calories.

The Libby’s brand of the product’s list of ingredients is as follows, in order: Mechanically separated chicken, chicken broth, water, beef, pork, contains less than 2 percent of salt, sugar, spices, sodium erythorbate, flavoring, sodium nitrate and garlic powder.

Spice’s take on Scum Weenie Nutrition:

What, such a classy name in a storage food and you want nutrition, too? You ask too much! Folks, a canned meat product ought to be more than 19% protein. How do you even get 77% fat out of ‘mechanically separated chicken’? There’s really only two ways: The chicken they use doesn’t go much beyond skin deep. Yep, chicken skin is technically chicken, and it’s loaded with fat and cholesterol, just like these scum weenies. Of course they could just be tossing in the little reservoirs of abdominal fat from when they process the chickens, too.

And the salt. Oi. More than a gram of salt in only 260 kcal; so about half the maximum desired salt level for a day in only about 1/8 of a day’s calories. Prep foods in general are bad about salt, but this is pretty over the top.

A minority of people are sensitive to nitrates and would be likely to develop headaches from this preservative. Nitrates also promote colon cancer, but in a prep food that’s probably not high on the list of worries.

My bottom line: If you’re going to lay in a prep with this particular kind of lousy nutrition, go instead for the sealed jars of ‘real crumbled bacon’ bits. The nutrition’s pretty similar, and more people enjoy the taste of real bacon. Your mileage may vary, though.

Salty’s take:

Are scum weenies a decent prep? No. For about the same money you can get a canned meat like tuna, which has an even longer list of “goods” and very few “bads”.

Skip the scum.

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