If there is one food that is emblematic of the US in the summertime, especially on the 4th of July, it is hot dogs. Between the bookends of summer in the US, starting with Memorial Day and ending with Labor Day, Americans eat about seven BILLION of them. Sure, there are other items like barbecue, potato salad, and apple pie that are associated with America summers, but none as iconic as the unidentified meat log stuffed in a bun and slathered with a variety of condiments (which ones depend on where in the US you are located). At Ravenous, Jaya Saxena dives into how hot dogs rose to prominence as an All-American food quite by accident.

New York street cart dogs with onion sauce and grilled red pepper relish from Food Network by Bobby Flay

The story, like many (if not most) US food stories, begins with immigrants - in this case German and Eastern European arrivals in the mid-1800s. They brought their sausage-making sensibilities with them and began selling them on the streets of major US cities. Hot dogs' rise to glory began at Coney Island, especially once public transit linked the beaches there with New York City. Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker set up his hot dog stand right outside the subway terminal, so one of the first things you would encounter when visiting Coney Island was the smell of hot dogs.

Baseball also plays a role in the ascendancy of hot dogs. As early as 1893, vendors were selling sausages at ball games during the summer. Hot dogs were perfect ballgame fare: portable, inexpensive, and not something you would make at home so there was a touch of novelty about them. Once hot dogs became mass produced and could be purchased at any grocery store instead of having to get them at a specialty butcher, they really took off because it was so easy to cook them.

As with most mass-produced items, marketing factors into the equation that leads to hot dogs being the summer food in the US. Jamie Loftus, author of Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, singles out the Oscar Meyer company, which he says “spent decades of our parents' childhood trying to associate hot dogs with not just America, but with American children.” The advertisements further associated hot dogs with summer vacation, and that created "basically the Disney model for processed food," says Loftus.

Getting the connection with the 4th of July also relied on marketing - and myth. The legend goes that on July 4, 1916, four immigrants met at Coney Island and competed to see who was the most patriotic. The yardstick for patriotism was who could eat the most hot dogs. A former publicist for Nathan's admitted to The New York Times that the company made up the story, which prompted real hot dog eating contests in the 1970s. Build it, and they will come.