I’m not sure what hot dog/frankfurter/sausage news services you subscribe to (I use LinkMax, NewsWurst, and Sausajournal) but wherever you get your hot dog-related news, I’m sure you saw something about the massive hot dog spill on Interstate 83 near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border a few days ago. Luckily, nobody was hurt, but a pretty massive cleanup effort had to be undertaken, which likely led any thoughtful person to ask a question in their head, a question a child might ask, but not a childish question: where is Joey Chestnut when you need him?
Yes, Joey Chestnut, the global hot dog-eating champion! Perhaps he could have helped out when a tractor trailer carrying thousands of hot dogs experienced some unspecified mechanical problem, which caused it to hit another car, then scrape along a concrete barrier, which tore open the side of the trailer, setting thousands of hot dogs free, where they cascaded out onto the road, the impact freeing them from their boxes as they spread out over the tarmac, creating a slippery mess.
Here’s some video of the hot dog spill, so you can get a sense of the scale:
You can also see the work crews and front-end loader being used to clean up the sausagey mess there, which is what got me thinking about hot-dog-eating champion Joey Chestnut. Could the people of Pennsylvania have been able to save resources and money if they just got Mr.Chestnut in there to eat all those discarded hot dogs?
If so, how long would it have taken Joey to do it? And, could they have sold tickets? I think they could have! This could have been turned into a net profit for the highway department if they had played their cards right!
So, with this in mind, let’s see if we can figure out how long it would have taken Joey Chestnut to clean up the hot dog spill. First, we need a good metric for just what Chestnut’s hot dog-eating capabilities are, and, thankfully, we have that, because he competed in the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest just earlier this year:
Majestic, isn’t it? In this most recent display of hot dog-consuming prowess, Chestnut managed to choke down 70 hot dogs in 10 minutes – and that includes buns! For the job of I-85 hot dog cleanup, he wouldn’t need to worry about buns, as the bun-carrying truck must have made it to its destination intact.
Okay, so Chestnut can consume 70 hot dogs in 10 minutes; that comes to 420 hot dogs per hour. So now we need to estimate how many hot dogs we’d be dealing with in this spill. We’ll start with the capacities of a refrigerated tractor-trailer.
A refrigerated trailer (reefer trailer, to use the proper jargon) has a capacity of 55,000 pounds, evenly distributed. Now, we have to factor in the refrigeration unit and other equipment and fuel, etc, along with the acceptable GVWR, which leaves, generally, a payload of about 49,000 pounds for the product. Some sources list this as being between 42,500 and 45,000 pounds, so I’ll use a conservative estimate of 45,000 pounds.
The hot dogs come packaged in plastic bags in cardboard boxes, which take up some amount of weight, so maybe let’s drop the total just-hot-dogs capacity to, oh, 42,000 pounds. Hot dogs are most commonly sold in sizes that work out to eight hot dogs per pound, so if we have 42,000 pounds of hot dogs on a truck, that comes to 336,000 individual hot dogs.
Now, Joey Chestnut, as we have established, can eat 420 hot dogs per hour, which means that it would take 800 hours – 33 days – to eat every single hot dog on that truck. This doesn’t include buns, but I think we’ll leave the estimate the same because I imagine Chestnut’s pace may need to be tempered a bit since the volumes in question are so much higher.
Of course, not every hot dog on that truck fell out on the road; one side was partially torn open, and a lot of hot dogs came out, but it’s not likely to have emptied that truck. I think we can conservatively estimate that maybe 25% of the truck’s contents escaped onto the road, at most.
So, with that in mind, let’s say that there were 84,000 hot dogs that ended up on the road. At 420 hot dogs per hour, that’s 200 hours, or a bit over 8 days. I suppose Joey has to sleep sometimes, and probably will need to take a pretty regular series of massive dumps along the way, so maybe we should factor that in and give him, what, 12 days total? That seems fair.
A dozen days of the greatest competitive eating spectacle the world has ever seen. Imagine it! Joey Chestnut could have been helicoptered in and been a hero, eating his way to freeing I-85 from its slippery, meaty shackles.
Sure, it would have taken a bit longer, but blocking a major interstate for almost two weeks seems a small price to pay to see an artist undertaking his life’s most ambitious work.
I love that even if you ignore the headline & byline, you can immediately tell it’s a Torch story within the first 5-10 words.
At some point do you stop taking massive dumps and just have a constant stream of dogs entering and exiting at the same rate?
Just relabel them as ‘kopi luwak’ hot dogs and charge 10x the price
Never mind Joey Chestnut and the hot dogs, how long would it take Monsieur Mangetout to eat the “refrigerated trailer (reefer trailer, to use the proper jargon)”??
After all, almost anyone, except, say, vegetarians/vegans and those with religious reasons for not eating pork, can eat hot dogs but it takes a special type to take on actually inedible items (though some people would argue hot dogs are inedible, lol.)
Monsieur Mangetout, whose nickname translates literally as Mister Eats-All and whose real name was Michel Lotito, made a career of eating various items such as an entire coffin (handles and all), numerous bicycles, and even a Cessna 150 airplane (!!)
He died at age 55 of “natural causes.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
I remember that guy from the 1980’s TV show That’s Incredible!
Ha, had forgotten about that show! Would be fun to see again, but, alas, it doesn’t seem to be available on streaming anywhere, at least not at the moment.
Actually first learned about Monsieur Mangetout from reading the Guinness Book of World Records back when they had those paperback editions with the ludicrously tiny print and the grainy b/w photos, lol.
There was always a picture of these guys on their little Honda motorcycles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McGuire_Twins#/media/File:Lynda_Carter_as_Wonder_Woman_with_McGuire_twins.jpg
The question is how long would it take my 66# dog? And how expensive would the vet bill be?
When I was a wrecker driver, we had a call for an overturned tractor trailer full of frozen beef. We hired some some people from the local welfare line and a team of 10 and I loaded 45,000 pounds of beef into a replacement truck on the side of the highway. Health inspector arrived and said we did it fast enough to save all the beef.
The tractor trailer, its driver, and contents were losers, which of course means that Mr. Chesnut was the big wiener.
In another life, I used to make sales calls on an honest-to-God hot dog factory. Hogs on the hoof came in at one end, packaged weenies came out the other. Everything in between was unimaginable.
I don’t think he would need to take time to poop. The rate at which the hot dogs exit would need to be the same as the rate at which they enter. It would end up being a single, extended event.
Oh good lord, now I have to gouge out my mind’s eye by imagining a sharp stick.
Cleaning up a hot dog spill by eating it would require an entirely different, and I would argue, equally gross type of clean up
First of all, that must smell amazing.
Second, and I’m speaking only for myself here, but there’s something uniquely off-putting about eating competitions. They just feel so frivolous, as if they celebrate wasting food. It strikes me as the competition-equivalent of rolling coal.
I’m putting my soapbox away now.
I generally agree with you, with one exception. Watching my young kids participate in an ice cream eating contest and dealing with brain freeze for the first time ever was HILARIOUS and I’d happily watch that again.
I’ll meet you there and at a kids cake-eating contest. They’re hysterical exceptions—and self-limiting. The winner isn’t polishing off 22 quarts of Neapolitan.
My wife and I once had lunch at a bar/restaurant in Seattle that thought the patrons would enjoy watching ESPN during their meal. Nothing unusual, except they were televising an eating contest at the time (grilled cheese sandwiches, I believe). Took all my willpower to: 1) Ignore the spectacle; and 2) Not ask the server “WTF?”
Yes, “majestic” comes to mind.
Fun fact: one hot dog has 650kJ of energy. 336,000 of them would be 21.8 million kJ.
That’s about 0.05 kiloton of TNT’s worth of energy.
In other words, it’s about 0.3% as powerful as some event happened 80 years ago to this day.
But the real question is how many hot dogs to get to 1.21 gigawatts? Asking for a friend
I love the math, but are we factoring decay? Because whats the rate of decay of his speed on the first 10-30 seconds vs the final? What about after an hour? We need to consider that before we claim 8 days nonstop. Whats the curve!
I’m assuming Chestnut can give it 100% nonstop. I have no idea what condition he’ll be in afterwards, though.
Dead. That’s the condition. Dead.
Spoken like a true boss.
Oh, I thought you meant decay of the hot dogs in the summer heat over a week….
If they are Oscar Mayer, they’ll be good for at least a month.
I imagine that after about 3 days of eating just weenies, the intake and pooping ratio would be pretty much 1-1, both in volume and time.
You never disappoint Torch! I drove this I-83 section only a couple of weeks ago.
Sounds like a plumber’s nightmare
Takeru Kobayashi would do it in 11 days
Kobayashi Maru would try but would be set up to fail.