I've recently gotten into an ongoing debate with a friend about the relative merits of different meat based topics for home-made pizzas. The fact that we are able to have an ongoing debate is either proof of our passion for meat, proof of our passion for homemade pizza, or proof that we have way too much time on our hands. My guess is that an argument can be made for all three.

Unlike many of my generation, I did not grow up on fast food. I grew up in a very rural area of Wisconsin and the the closest thing to fast food that was the closest to us geographically was an A& W Drive In where they had shag carpet on the floor and still served root beer in glass mugs. It was a hamburger restaurant, technically, but they cooked stuff from scratch and had real cutlery and the service wasn't even all that peppy, so calling it “fast food” was a stretch.

My mom took me to McDonald's when I was probably eight or nine and I remember thinking “hmmm this is pretty fun” I doubt that I thought it was tasty; we grew most of our own food, my mom even baked her own bread and what we couldn't grow, we bought from our neighbors. To me, beef came from the deep freeze labeled with the stamp of the farm the cow grew up on; we bought what we called a “half beef” every year. I didn't taste Taco Bell until was probably a teenager and I didn't have Burger King, if I recall correctly, until I went away to college.

Well our friends at PETA are at it again. A few years ago they decided that the real problem in American society is the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile so they spent perfectly good money, hiring full time people to chase it around the United States and conducing protests wherever it stopped. I doubt it made people stop eating hot dogs, but it got PETA a lot of attention which seems to be what PETA likes best.

I don't know how anyone who loves meat cannot not love hotdogs. There are so many different types of hotdogs from turkey to chicken to all beef to kosher to all natural to all tofu dogs, there is definitely a hot dog taste for every taste. Unless you actually don't like the taste of hotdogs, in which case it's better to stick with tofu dogs (sometimes they are called pups, for no apparent reason) because they taste absolutely nothing like hot dogs.