Frankly speaking, I take mine with kraut

In our national quest for healthier foods, I insist on one glorious exception. We demand to know every last calorie and additive and chemical in our meals, yet there’s one item that must remain exempt from analysis. Its historic origins are shrouded in mystery; its ingredients are ill-defined.

I refer to the hot dog, and I celebrate the dawg amid National Hot Dog Month in the U.S. Even these days, when a New York City mayor feels empowered to limit the size of sugary drinks, people consume hot dogs by the billion — 1.7 billion a year, to be precise. And that’s just in supermarkets. This July Fourth Americans enjoyed 150 million dogs, enough to stretch from D.C. to L.A. more than five times.

If you care about its history, and I can’t really understand why you would, since the moral imperative is to accept and consume hot dogs as a fact of life, it is said that the sausage was first mentioned in Homer’s “The Odyssey” in the ninth century B.C. And all these years I thought Odysseus was eating feta cheese on his way to Ithaca. If you read the American Bill of Rights very closely, you’ll find the right to eat hot dogs just before “pursuit of happiness” and just after “liberty.”

The sacred wiener probably came to America along with German immigrants, who referred to their tasty sausages as little dachshunds. Some say the long dog was first made by Johann Georghehner, a butcher who lived in Coburg, Germany, in the 1600s. Others trace its origins to the city of Frankfurt, which claims that the hot dog began there in 1487, before Columbus set sail for the new world.

The people of Vienna point to the word “wiener” to prove their claim as the birthplace of the dog. But they say the same thing about the Viennese table. I don’t buy it. And while we’re discussing wieners, I’m just saying, Anthony Weiner didn’t deserve the honored name, even if his is spelled differently.