Ewwww....

Have you seen this? The meat in 'vegetarian' hot dogs is troubling. The human DNA brings up echoes of Soylent Green (although I, of course, realise it's a sanitation issue, and it's not like people's fingers are mixed in, but still, yuck).

Clear Food: The Hot Dog Report

Of the 345 hot dogs and sausages Clear Food analyzed for this report, 14.4% were problematic in some way. Problems included substitutions and hygienic issues. Substitution occurs when ingredients are added that do not show up on the label. Hygienic issues occur when some sort of non-harmful contaminant is introduced to the hot dog, in most cases, human DNA. Here's what we found:

• Substitution: We encountered a surprising number of substitutions or unexpected ingredients. We found evidence of meats not found on labels, an absence of ingredients advertised on labels, and meat in some vegetarian products.
• Hygienic issues: Clear Food found human DNA in 2% of the samples, and in 2/3rds of the vegetarian samples.

We found evidence of chicken (in 10 samples), beef (in 4 samples), turkey (in 3 samples), and lamb (in 2 samples) in products that were not supposed to contain those ingredients.

I don't tend to eat vegetarian hot dogs, although of course I have, but a friend does. Smart Dog, the brand he usually gets, wasn't mentioned, so I don't know where it fell in the scoring. Morningstar Farm veggie dogs did score high on their scale. I'll ask and see if he wants to consider switching, perhaps.