The Lord compares Himself to a grain of mustard seed, sharp to the taste, and the least of all seeds, whose strength is extracted by bruising
- Hilary of Poitiers
I like eating hotdogs. Specifically, I like eating the cheapest hotdogs I can get, fried in oil on my skillet, served in a slice of the cheapest white bread I can buy. I eat them with mustard, and on occasion, ketchup. Sometimes I'll make them with fried onions too, but then you've got to cook the onions first and time them with the hotdogs, otherwise you'll have a hot hotdog and cold onions, and cold onions get claggy and greasy and don't taste as nice as when they're fresh. It's a little treat I give to myself every now and then - as I get older, I eat out less, I put less effort into food because I'd rather save my brain for other things, and sometimes it's just nice to feed your soul as much as your body. This is all well and good, but it's fleeting, transient, and unreal. The moment of solace I get when I have a hotdog, a cold beer, and sit with my cat only exist because of a bounty of resources, time, and convenience upon which I can draw. I can enjoy this moment in time with my hotdogs, my beer and my cat because of the arrangement of circumstances that facilitate its existence. The experience doesn't exist without my making it happen.
Hotdogs do not occur in nature.
Sausage
A standard-issue hotdog consists of a grilled, steamed, or boiled sausage served in the cut bread of a partially sliced bun. The bread doesn’t need to take the form of a bun, it can be a white-bread square, it can be a tortilla, and in a pinch, a bagel works as well. Hotdogs are sausages, and sausages are interesting things in and of themselves. The historical view on sausages is that they weren’t invented deliberately - rather, they are a byproduct of efficient butchery, in which a butcher would salt and preserve tissues of the dismantled animal and stuff them into a casing made of their own intestines, producing the characteristic cylindrical shape. Sausages are some of the oldest prepared foods eaten by humankind, where the tablets of Akkad talk about dishes of intestine casings filled with forcemeat, where Homer in his Odyssey mentions blood sausage, and where even the Dynasties of China had their little treats as well. Sausages came about as a natural outcome of the optimisation of a larger system of butchery. Offal, organs, blood and bone are natural parts of the butchered animal and so to waste them was to introduce inefficiency into the butchery process. Blood and bone are excellent fertilisers, being rich in phosphates, calcium, magnesium and other minerals that plants crave. Sausages are convenient little containers into which the less-fancy sections of meat can be put. They are a marvel of efficiency, re-use, and top-to-tail consumption. Yet, the phrase goes, if you love the sausage, don’t learn how it’s made. Sausages are made of the not-so-sexy parts of animals - the guts, the gore, and the gristle, all ground up and mechanically separated. A sausage is almost like a simulacrum of an animal - it seems absurd to put a picture of a cow, pig, or lamb on the packet in which sausages are sold because the one doesn’t map onto the other. Where is the dignity in a steer that has been reduced to a cylindrical portion of reticulated meat. Where is the biblical lamb that has been stuffed into itself and vacuum wrapped. Where is the wily hog, the most intelligent of those animals, made into a gross parody of its own essential being. A sausage is a victory of systemic efficiency that reduces its constituent elements to a point of absurd reductive abstraction. A sausage has no bones, no contraction, no liveliness. One sausage is the amalgamation of the material of several animals, emulsified, liquefied, strained, and ultimately inexorably joined together into a whirlpool of protein sludge that is portioned into chunks. A single sausage is the apex of optimised industrialised farming, where animals are raised, slaughtered, transported, their outputs separated and packaged, transported again, stowed, and eaten. Each sausage is a marvel of the Industrial Revolution, of the Neoliberal market, of Capitalism, one in which the time spent growing an animal, the energy spent on its care, the manufacture of machines, processes, markets and presentation, the exchange of legal tender, all result in a small element of a single aesthetic experience with which I bolster the flagging stature of my soul by feeding myself a delicious little treat. In the skin of a sausage there is the animal. In the bread of the bun there is ensconced the child of that machinery, that market, that monstrosity of reductive abstraction, and in the moment of its consumption I place myself at the apex of that systemic efficiency, the recipient, reifactor, and reflector of that glory back at it - I am the benefactor of that systemic excess, of attention, industry, and time.
The Hotdog exists because I the person, I the population, and I the power have made it so.
Bread and Beer
Bread and beer are ancient things too, and more Holy than sausages. I eat my hotdogs in a split bread bun, and usually cool the stinging fresh heat of the meal with a sip of beer. Both bread and beer are products of wheat, though through different industrial processes, though beer is most commonly fermented from malted barley, it can be made from wheat as well. In fact, my favourite beers are German wheat beers, which were introduced from Bohemia in the 15th Century. The brewing of wheat-based beers in German is given such consideration that by law, they may only use specific wheats, specific yeasts, and specific processes to produce a product whose performance and purity is always ensured - trust the Germans to say a thing or two about purity laws (and German Wurst is excellent too). Beer and bread are common in religions all over the world - I’m a Roman Catholic (and have been since before I was born) so I accept that in the Eucharistic Transubstantiation I take the Body of Christ into myself when I eat the little wafer. The Blood of Christ is taken in wine, naturally, seeing as the Vatican is in Italy, but you don’t need to look far to find the importance of beer in religion. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the Norse and the Mayans all imbibed fermented cereal grain products and imbued them with ritualistic significance. In fact, citizens of Pharaonic Egypt were given leave from their labours to brew beer as part of religious observances. Truly, some things may have been better the way they were before, but all things change with time. Time is the secret ingredient in bread and beer, because of the yeast. The serendipitous Saccharomyces Cerevisiae is known as brewer’s yeast and baker’s yeast because it ferments beer and makes it alcoholic, and it allows a lump of dough to rise into a loaf of bread. The humble yeast is a living, single-celled fungus that lies dormant until it comes in contact with warm water. When this happens, the yeast begins feeding on flour sugars, releasing carbon dioxide in bread and alcohol in brewed beer. Yeast is an interesting thing because it, like us, is a biological thing. Mankind lives in Eukaryotic brotherhood with this tiny fungal micro-organism in many ways, and just as humans seek to optimise themselves and their systems, societies, and social lives, so too have we sought to optimise the productivity of the humble yeast particle. Yeast exists in a delicate balance of concentration, temperature, acidity, and chemical products. Adding more yeast may accelerate processes but also produces different flavours of bread and beer because of how these little beasties do their job - yeast will act differently when it has oxygen and no oxygen, when it has too much or too little heat or pressure. Bread and Beer rely on a tenuous, balanced, and almost subservient relationship between ourselves and the fungal catalyst we need to make our products and make them perform, act, and taste the way we want them to. We’ve tried to optimise the yeast - by tampering with its genes, its programming, and its environment to maximise its efficiency. Yeast is a tool in the system of production - as central and as unaware of its centrality to so much of human life as a cow is of its eventual fate on the pan of my skillet. Yet, in our dependence upon these substrates, our system is subservient to them. Without the yeast, without the beast, there is no farm, no output, no hotdog. Human technological, scientific, and societal innovation and progress have developed as our powers of mastery over the world around us have increased, as we have harnessed the potential energy in fuel reactants, as we have made chemicals and forces do our bidding, and as we have turned our designs to the very biological subcomponents in genes and germs that give our fungal and farmyard substrates their fundamental characteristics. We are all subservient to the limitations of systemic components, and all those components are subservient to time. The creation of Bread and Beer are exercises in patience, in balance, in care and reflection - you cannot be too eager, too hasty, too aggressive or use too much to make things go faster because to do so would upset the balance. My parable of Bread and Beer is that the potential of wheat is brought out with time, with gentle care, attention, and in partnership with the fungus among us. Perhaps that’s why it’s the bread of life - because wheat is a humble crop, and bread is a humble output, but through that humility, patience, and time, even humble things like hotdogs can sustain us, support us, and strengthen us.
Hotdogs, however, do not appear in the Bible.
Mustard
Jesus said that The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into flour until it worked all through the dough. The Parable of the Yeast is told after the Parable of the Mustard Seed, where though it is the smallest of all seeds, it grows into the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches. From little things, big things grow, as Paul Kelly would say. Mustard as a condiment is made from those seeds, where their whole, ground, cracked or bruised products are mixed with water, vinegar, lemon juice, even wine, to create a paste that has a strong, spicy, bitter taste. To grind the seed of the mustard plant into a condiment is to deny its potential to grow into anything else, to make it into a bitter yellow paste instead of letting it become a brilliant yellow flower. To turn the parable to paste is to take the slaughtering bolt gun to the brain of the lamb. Mustard, sausages, bread, and beer exist as icons of the absolute control humans have over the fate of their surroundings. The Mustard Seed emphasises that something small, no matter how small it may appear, can grow and produce remarkable, even incredible outcomes. So too with yeast. So too with animals. So too with people. But just as the mustard seed must be planted and grown, as the bread and the beer are left to rise and ferment, the systems that give rise to those outputs must also attend with systemic care to their substrates. Mustard seeds take ten days to germinate, one hundred days to mature, thirty-five more days to bud, and ten more days to reach full bloom. A mustard plant will grow from planted seed to realised parable in one hundred and fifty days. That’s one hundred and fifty days of care, of attention, of protection. Bread takes one and a half hours for the first rise, then an hour for the second rise. That’s one hundred and fifty minutes. After brewing, beer needs conditioning, curing, and carbonating, each step taking a week, each step about one hundred and fifty hours spent waiting, less time fiddling around. One hundred and fifty minutes for the bread, multiples of one hundred and fifty hour increments for the beer, one hundred and fifty days for the mustard tree to bloom, or one hundred and fifty seconds for it to be ground up and mixed into paste. Time, care, attention, and direction give rise to the things with which I sustain myself, with the product of time in the bread, in the bottle, in the bratwurst. Every loaf of bread, can of beer, and cooked sausage is a victory - a systemic triumph of human will over the world around us to the extent that brilliant surpluses are accessible, enjoyable, and delectable.
Hotdogs are, after all, delectable.
The convenience of being able to eat a meal, to put fuel in my car, to power my home and my practice, and to live my life are the result of processes so abstract and divorced from my lived experience as to make them incomprehensible. My experience is of the immediate - the road ahead of me, the hours blocked in my schedule, of the tasks in my diary, and of the hunger I feel. In spite of its smallness, it is still space that I can fill with good things, with hotdogs, with bread, and with beer, alongside love, comfort, and industry. The challenge is to remember that the systems around me are as alien to me as they are because they’ve grown to massive size as to become part of the landscape, crushing out the natural world. We exist because of love and care, tended to by systems as monstrous and strange as the hand of a farmer is to the seed of mustard, or as the loaf of wheat is to the grain of mustard. We are ensconced in, embraced by, and at the same time uplifted and slaughtered by their huge size and terrible abstracted indifference - an indifference that has given rise to industry, to the economy, and to the humble hotdog and beer on a Saturday afternoon.
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