A food-analytics start-up (Christ, these fucking buzzwords) has apparently found evidence of things in hot dogs that, uh...aren’t supposed to be there.


Clear Foods is a new California-based (where else) start-up whose goal is apparently to conduct genetic tests on mass-produced food in an effort to combat food-borne illness. To that end, they recently product-tested 345 commonly-available hot dogs and sausages to find everything in them that should not have been, and released it under the extremely clever and original name “The Hot Dog Report.” Spoiler: boy, did they find some stuff that wasn’t on the ingredients list.

The report says Clear Foods “found evidence of meats not on the labels” in about 15% of all tested samples, which make sense, as you wouldn’t expect hot dog-makers to actually tell you they’re serving you weasel rectums. OK, OK, to be fair, they didn’t actually find any weasel rectums in the hot dogs (that they’re willing to tell us about, anyway—never know if Big Anus is threatening them to keep it under wraps), but they did find a surprising amount of pork being substituted in chicken and beef hot dogs. This is an obvious issue, since as the report points out, there are a lot of people who don’t eat pork for religious reasons. Also, 10% of the vegetarian samples tested positive for chicken or pork, which I am reasonably sure are not vegetables.


More problematic is the fact that in 2% of the samples tested, Clear Food claims to have found “Human DNA.” Distressingly, they don’t elaborate on what the hell that means. We can probably assume it doesn’t mean hot dogs are MADE OF PEEEEEEOOOPLLEEE! But does that mean a skin flake that fell into the meat machine, which would be bad enough, or does it mean something far worse? I’m going to leave what could be worse to your imagination.*

So...enjoy your processed meat tubes, I guess?

* Semen. It’s semen. I’m referring to the possibility of jizz dogs. Just want to make sure everyone got that.

Image via Elena Shashkina /Shutterstock.