This challenge is the ultimate test of a carnivore and a direct assault on everything I believe about the importance of being at the top of the food chain. If I literally can't stomach this dare, then I have no choice but to declare myself a hypocrite, repent, and thereafter change my breakfast ritual from sausage and bacon to celery and cereal.
Within a few days, Eileen and I are driving to the Fineberg Meat Packing Company on the northern edge of Memphis. Since we're both reporters, arranging the tour is easy, but company President Ben Fineberg, a heavyset old curmudgeon, gets us off to a late start because he's too busy having his blood pressure monitored by his middle-aged secretary (it's too high, she tells him). Fineberg briefly rants to us about the importance of the hot dog in American culture before gruffly turning us over to a foreman. The door from the administrative offices takes us to the precise middle stage of the frankfurter manufacturing process.
It is a surreal scene. Remember the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, when all that delightful milk chocolate flowed like a bountiful river? Picture that, except with a river full of meat that more closely resembles fresh horseshit. And instead of a free-flowing river, picture a few enormous steel bowls swirling this fresh horseshit around unceasingly.
After you are finished imagining that, try to imagine a tremendous heat bearing down on you--from all sides of your body, really. And combine this heat with an intense, fetid smell better associated with sewers.
The tour is painfully slow, made worse by the unpleasant sights, the insufferable temperature, and that unrelenting odor. The factory manager explains the entire history of the creation of a frankfurter, which begins with a cow's slaughter and ends with a plastic case around a dozen phallic-shaped chunks of meat. Eileen doesn't seem to mind, but she's prepared herself by getting more stoned than an early Christian in the Roman Empire.
We don't see a cow get slaughtered, but we witness the immediate aftermath: cow heads thrown in garbage bins, their placid bovine eyes still looking dumbly upward. Actually, I don't mind this, but for some reason I almost lose it when we walk into a small storage room at the corner of the factory. Placed quite innocuously in this storage room is a giant barrel containing a pink, sandy-textured substance. What is it? we ask. Nitrite, the foreman replies, the stuff that makes hot dogs plump when ya cook 'em.
Beheaded cows and big vats of meat paste don't bother me, but the pink ingredient, standing alone in the corner, looking like the stuff your grade-school teacher threw over lunchroom vomit, almost makes me hurl and faint at the same time.
Around noon, the tour ends. Now comes the real test.
By 12:24 p.m. we are sitting in a diner in downtown Memphis. Eileen hands me one freshly cooked frankfurter, only slightly camouflaged by mustard, ketchup, and relish.
I stare at it.
I wince.
I take a bite.
Eileen's eyes widen, her mouth gapes, her hands grip the table's edge, ready to push herself away if my psyche (and my mouth) reject the abhorrently processed food.
That nanosecond in time when my taste buds make initial contact with the outer "skin" of that frankfurter is indescribable. I will try anyway. In a flash, I am transported back to that processing plant. This time, though, the ghastly sights, sounds, smells, and climate of the place batter my body from the inside out, pressing on my chest, pushing up into the inside of my mouth. I want to vomit until I am expelling meals my rectum had disposed of a dozen years ago.
Instead, I do my best to smile. "Mmm-hmmm," I say. "That's reee-al good."
