Raw Dog
Ratings16
Average rating3.9
A NEW YORK TIMES AND INDIE BESTSELLER!
Part travelogue, part culinary history, all capitalist critique—comedian Jamie Loftus's debut, Raw Dog, will take you on a cross-country road trip in the summer of 2021, and reveal what the creation, culture, and class influence of hot dogs says about America now.
A Best Book of the Year from NPR and Vulture. Featured in: NPR Weekend Edition • Bon Appétit • Oprah Daily • Glamour • NY Mag • Splendid Table • The Wall Street Journal • Eater • Betches • USA Today • Boston Globe • Eater • Slate • The Next Big Idea Club • Buzzfeed and more
“Wise and funny” —ANDY RICHTER • “Revealing, funny, sad, horny, and insatiably curious” —SARAH MARSHALL • “A wild ride” —ROBERT EVANS • “Deeply incisive and hilariously honest” —JACK O’BRIEN • “Gonzo yet vulnerable” —GABE DUNN • “Hot dog Moby-Dick” —BRANSON REESE • “One of the freshest and most insightful new comedic voices of this decade.” —LINDSAY ELLIS
Hot dogs. Poor people created them. Rich people found a way to charge fifteen dollars for them. They’re high culture, they’re low culture, they’re sports food, they’re kids' food, they’re hangover food, and they’re deeply American, despite having no basis whatsoever in America's Indigenous traditions. You can love them, you can hate them, but you can’t avoid the great American hot dog.
Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs is part investigation into the cultural and culinary significance of hot dogs and part travelog documenting a cross-country road trip researching them as they’re served today. From avocado and spice in the West to ass-shattering chili in the East to an entire salad on a slice of meat in Chicago, Loftus, her pets, and her ex eat their way across the country during the strange summer of 2021. It’s a brief window into the year between waves of a plague that the American government has the resources to temper, but not the interest.
So grab a dog, lay out your picnic blanket, and dig into the delicious and inevitable product of centuries of violence, poverty, and ambition, now rolling around at your local 7-Eleven.
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If you are reading this book primarily for hot dogs, you are going to be disappointed. This book feels like a long stand up, loosely tied around hot dogs, a mix of social commentary, personal reflection, and food criticism. To me, the highlight of the book is the brief history of competitive hot dog eating contests.
I have a request: please don't read this book. No, wait - I don't mean that like it sounds. I mean please LISTEN to this book. I know the “audio books are cheating” feelings are real, but there are some books that are much improved by listening to them, and this is one. Jamie Loftus has a unique voice and a great energy that I'm not sure would carry as strongly in print. When you listen to the audiobook it's like you are hanging with your good friend James as she tells you about the extremely weird summer she just had.
This book may have surprised me the most of any book I have tackled in recent memory. I thought it was going to be a quirky book about hot dogs, but it is in fact so much more. Jamie tackles the tricky social elements inherent in a snack that is created to be unhealthy and served at low prices to poor people. It is also about - surprisingly - some important relationships in her life and what happens to them as a result of her American wiener quest. And most bizarrely, also hyperfocused on the social lives of the few, the proud: the Wienermobile drivers.
You can trust Jamie's reviews. She has the hot-dog bona fides, and takes her subject seriously, which is evident in the thorough and thoughtful methodology practiced in her field research. Her vivid descriptions of the businesses, their employees, and the foodstuffs themselves (plus sizable diversions on the marketing trend of personifying and gendering pickles, of all things) made me want to experience some of these places myself - and isn't that the mark of any successful travelogue?
Raw Dog is a delightfully crude travel memoir that recounts a journey around the United States filled with the overconsumption of hot dogs, heartbreak, and a class-conscious history of urban development, meat packing, and national identity.
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