Federal Redesign of Hot Dogs?

From a Richmond Times‐​Dispatch editorial, the sort of passage you think at first must be satire:

At the instigation of the American Academy of Pediatrics, federal bureaucrats at the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are studying whether to require the nation’s hot‐​dog makers to redesign hot dogs to reduce the likelihood of choking.

But it’s not satire, as other news clips confirm.


Now, as every parent knows who makes sure to cut up a hot dog for the smallest eaters, the risk of choking on one of these food objects is not zero (though it is very, very low; 13 children’s deaths in 2006 were linked to hot‐​dog asphyxiation, but children eat nearly 2 billion hot dogs a year). In that sense, the proposal is less obviously batty than some other federal regulatory initiatives that have upended whole sectors of commerce over risks that have never been shown to have harmed anyone at all.


But notice that the only truly effective way to keep the familiar cylindrical hot dog off the plates of small children would be to ban it for everyone — the logical end point, perhaps, of a policy that infantilizes parents by assuming they cannot be trusted to watch out for their children’s safety. If on some future Memorial Day you find only squared‐​off frankfurters or triangular‐​prism bratwursts in the supermarket cooler, don’t say you weren’t warned.