Lowly hot dog gets safety makeover

Messing with the hot dog is like messing with the American summer.

We'll consume an estimated 7 billion dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Call them wienies, call them franks or call them red hots. But should we call them dangerous?

The American Academy of Pediatrics says so, because children can choke on them.

Now an inventor says he has come up with a revolutionary idea for an improved hot dog design: Make incisions down the sides so that, as it heats, the dog will open into a floral-type design that will more easily break apart if stuck in the throat.

"What we're trying to do is make a safer hot dog," said idea man Gene Gagliardi Jr. of Creativators in Pennsylvania.

Cindy Fauntz of Fairway, Kan., said she could see the benefit of the design not only for children but also for older people.

"It looks kind of weird, and I usually go for looks," Fauntz said upon being a shown a photo of the product while shopping at her neighborhood Hen House store. "I would probably purchase something like that, if it's a health issue."

"I don't think so," said Janet Riley, president of the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. "I think a wholesale redesign of the hot dog from its iconic shape as a long, tubular food product is a bit unlikely."

The pediatrics academy cited a study finding that a child dies from choking on food about once every five days in the United States and that 17 percent of those asphyxiations among children younger than 10 were caused by hot dogs. It called for warning labels on packages of hot dogs.

Critics of the "nanny state" groaned.

"What, are we raising a bunch of weenies?" one person posted to a discussion at MeatingPlace.com.

Riley does not discount the risk of kids choking on hot dogs -- or carrots, grapes or any cylindrical food. But, she said, many hot dog manufacturers already put messages on their products advising parents to cut up the dogs for children.

Gagliardi said his process improves on that.

"The throat is about the diameter of a pencil, so when a child or adult or anyone gets a piece of hot dog stuck in their throat, even the Heimlich method may not dislodge it," he said. "With this, the piece will fall apart into eight little pieces."

Gagliardi had previously invented a do-it-yourself device called the Guard Dog for people to create lengthwise slits in their hot dogs at home. But he sold that patent.

Now Gagliardi is promoting technology to be adopted by hot dog manufacturers at the factory. He calls it Kinder Cut (with "kinder" pronounced as the German word for children). He is working with Rastelli Foods Group to license the technology and has a first client in Berks Packing Co., a meat processor that distributes in southeastern Pennsylvania.

"The goal is to have every company that makes hot dogs" on board, Gagliardi said, "from the big ones to the small ones."

Aside from being safer, he says, Kinder Cuts will make hot dogs taste better.