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jonna_doucette 's review for:
Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs
by Jamie Loftus
medium-paced
Disappointing—It’s giving Tucker Max meets Charlotte Roche, circa mid-2000s. As a fellow devotee of The Dog, I started this book excited to dine vicariously through Loftus’s Triple D-style excursions, celebrating an iconic taste of Americana and its rich history, both culinary and sociocultural, served up with a heaping helping of dog-industry insider information. Instead, I found myself trapped in the backseat (with Loftus’s pets), an unwitting passenger on an interminable road trip in search of a punchline without a destination, forced to endure the author’s violent commitment to ‘the bit,’ and frequent, eye-roll-worthy descriptions of her overactive excretory system.
For its faults, of which there are many (see: Loftus’s a-hole choice to flout lock-down and travel/research this book during the height of the pandemic), this book had the makings of something better that was lost along the roadside of Loftus’s journey. A travelogue? Yeah. A culinary history? Maybe... if you squint. Capitalist critique? Certainly not. Unfortunately, for the small amount of ink Loftus spares for actually interesting, prescient topics, like industrial safety standards for slaughter houses, meatpackers, and the animals we farm for food, or ethnocentrism within competitive eating, she wastes twice as many pages playing at being an insecure girl next door from Bah-ston and hoping we’ll accept her anyways, like so many of the humble, working-class delicacies she’s sampled across our great country.
For anyone interested in actual meat-centered food history/commentary, I suggest the following:
Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat
The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics
Salted and Cured: Savoring the Culture, Heritage, and Flavor of America's Preserved Meats
Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat
For its faults, of which there are many (see: Loftus’s a-hole choice to flout lock-down and travel/research this book during the height of the pandemic), this book had the makings of something better that was lost along the roadside of Loftus’s journey. A travelogue? Yeah. A culinary history? Maybe... if you squint. Capitalist critique? Certainly not. Unfortunately, for the small amount of ink Loftus spares for actually interesting, prescient topics, like industrial safety standards for slaughter houses, meatpackers, and the animals we farm for food, or ethnocentrism within competitive eating, she wastes twice as many pages playing at being an insecure girl next door from Bah-ston and hoping we’ll accept her anyways, like so many of the humble, working-class delicacies she’s sampled across our great country.
For anyone interested in actual meat-centered food history/commentary, I suggest the following:
Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat
The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating
Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics
Salted and Cured: Savoring the Culture, Heritage, and Flavor of America's Preserved Meats
Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cursing, Excrement
Moderate: Eating disorder, Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Racism