After Finn realizes that the Huge King is keeping him captive, devises and half-implements an escape plan, meets up with Jake who fell down a parallel hole in the woods and eventually makes it out of the oven pipe with 77I8 (aka Seven)—once they are all free, Seven, who no longer has to live on a diet of walnuts and rain that falls onto his makeshift air raft, tells Finn he’d like to get himself “a giant flipping hot dog!”
Finn, disgusted, replies, “Yeugh. Don’t you know those things are made out of, like, the grossest junk?”
To which Seven, having acquired newfound freedom and serenity, responds, “Man, I don’t give a toot!”
Hot dog enjoyers such as Seven and myself will sometimes encounter the kinds of disparaging comments that Finn makes at the end of this episode, and we may get some pleasure out of informing these nay-sayers about our cavalier attitude toward these ultra-processed meat tubes. We may feel like mavericks as we make clear the lack of toots we have to give.
You know who else doesn’t give a toot about the gross junk in hot dogs? How about US Senator and presidential loser, Willard Mitt Romney? Here’s a segment of an interview he conducted with The Cut where he lauds the dog in the least relatable way possible:
How about former US Senator and presidential winner, Barack Hussein Obama?
How about this bear that beat the then world-champion competitive hot dog eating human, Kobayahshi?
None of these fools gives a single friggin toot!
One of the most prominent non-toot-givers vis-à-vis hot dogs is Jamie Loftus, who wrote what simply has to be among the top seven hot dog-centered travelogues currently in circulation, Raw Dog. In the chapter titled “Here is How You Make a Hot Dog,” Loftus describes a YouTube video titled, “How It’s Made – Hot Dogs”:
We see the meat trimmings enter the factory and slap down a gigantic metal slide into a tenderizer. “Trimmings” are a gentle term for the wide variety of meat considered not good enough to be a part of a better-conceived dish—essentially garbage being repurposed as a mass-appeal food [. . .] The trimmings are cut and ground, going through a series of pressurized metal plates and grinders that shoot out a flesh-colored meat slurry in thin spaghetti strands into another metal bucket. “How It’s Made – Hot Dogs” elects to show an extended shot of pinkish ground meat as a drum solo plays for the longest ten seconds of my life and yours, before crossfading to something even more horrific—a hundred pounds of liquified processed chicken meat as being heaped on top of it, followed by food starch and salt to bind the meats into a uniform pudding of food deemed edible enough.
I’ll stop there. But know that it gets worse. So maybe it’s not entirely accurate to say that Loftus is a non-toot giver. She kind of gives a toot. She gives enough of a toot to subtitle this chapter, “A note to my vegetarian and vegans and those who do not engage with the meat-dog—you are right.” Before acknowledging, in sickening detail, the plight of the animals that will be reduced to the scraps that will be reconstituted into hot dogs, Loftus reaffirms her chapter’s subtitle: “Again—the choice to not eat meat is the correct one. Vegetarians, you are right.” She concludes this section of her book by discussing some of the labor that goes into making hot dogs:
Look, I’m not posing naked on a PETA billboard (I would but I have weird boobs and no one asked), but you don’t need to be a soldier to the cause to realize that the reality of factory farms is an integrated scheme to exploit everyone involved but those at the top—the animals are treated without mercy by underpaid employees, who in turn make an unhealthy product to be marketed to the poor, who consume and shorten their own lifespans by enjoying it.
So, yeah, in her book about travelling around America and eating shitloads of hot dogs, Jamie Loftus does in fact give admit she gives a toot about all the gross stuff that goes into hot dogs. And I agree with her that vegetarians are right. Factory farming is currently, and—if it is ever rightly abolished—these practices will later be remembered as a great shame on all of us. And I say this as a person who eats meat and ate two hot dogs just before writing this very review. I really like hot dogs. I sometimes bring a pack of hot dogs to work and, when I microwave a couple in the faculty lounge, I sneak them back to my office between two plates and hope that no one stops me in the hallway to ask what’s for lunch because, as I said, I like to eat hot dogs, but I am, in my heart-of-hearts, conflicted about it. It is an immoral thing I do, and I only hope I can one day put my beliefs into practice and give up hot dogs and meat in general. As Mark Greif laments of his own meat-eating in his excellent essay “On Food,” “I hope I will learn to be moral, by and by.”
I think we all know this stuff, though. We all know that hot dogs are generally made from the less-desirable parts of animals that don’t get the dignity of having a “cut” by which they might be identified at a grocery store or on a restaurant menu. We know they’re ultra-processed and bad for us. We know about the evil labor practices foisted on the factory workers who do the ultra-processing work 1. I suspect even Seven, who has forgotten so much during his time in the stove pipe, knows that. He doesn’t seem at all surprised, at least, to hear from Finn that hot dogs are made of the grossest junk. In fact, his response that he does not give a toot suggests very strongly that he knows all about the gross junk but—like me and, I’m sure, some of you—is willing to look past it.
And we might say that Seven deserves a giant flipping hot dog. He has, after all, been floating in solitude, subsisting on nothing but FreeCell, walnuts, and rain for so very long. Who could begrudge him the simple pleasure of a hot dog? What if he had said he wanted a New York strip steak? Or a Cuban sandwich? Or a bucket of fried chicken? Those are all made of dead animals, but I don’t think Finn would’ve said anything about the horrific systems behind those entrees. What’s Finn’s problem with hot dogs in particular? And anyway, couldn’t we argue that there’s something ethical about using, and not simply throwing out, the less-savory parts of the animals we slaughter?
Maybe. It feels like we’d be reaching, but maybe. In any case, I think Finn’s objection to the food is rooted in the hot dog as a cultural object. The hot dog, more than any other food I can think of, makes us think of where it comes from and what it causes (biologically, socially, economically, morally). Packed in its pink cylindrical casing are all the abject horrors of the meat processing industry. The hot dog reminds us, in our most lucid moments, of where our food comes from and who suffers for the idle pleasure of eating it. With “Walnuts & Rain,” Tom Herpich uses a dream-like story structure to persuade us to consider, with some lucidity, the grossest junk that goes into, and comes out of, its existence. It awaken us to the realities of the hot dog.
Many of us may sometimes slip into a sort of default alimentary/gustatory mode similar to that of the Huge King. We become lodged in our throne, surrounded by the dull trappings of our not-so-stately pleasure dome, thoughtlessly munching on whatever the anonymous Food Boys toss into our mouth 2. When we slip into this mode, the misery of the beings who support our lifestyle are abstracted. We catch glimpses of their toils as represented generically, over and over again, in regular time slots, their demeaning antics repeated for our entertainment. Their tedious performances are presented alongside the heavy-handed message, “IN TOIL WE KRIMBER,” but we may only occasionally stop to ask ourselves some important questions. What does it even mean to krimber? What does the toil of these automatons have to do with me? Do I toil? Do I krimber? Do I give a toot?
Oh, what to do with the Ice King?
From the moment I started these reviews I wanted to track IK’s story. But, since what interested me was specifically the dementia parallels in his character, it only really works in episodes when we get to learn about Simon, or about his ‘condition’ of being turned into the Ice King. When it comes to ‘the Ice King himself’, as it were, the Ice King as a persona, as a character… well, often enough I enjoy his antics, sometimes he’s interesting, but more and more I’ve gotten tired of seeing him do the same old schtick all the time.
I signed up for this review because, like always, I was hoping for another glimpse into Simon’s transformation. Instead I got something that was tough to enjoy because of how unbearable IK is. Which is fine, I guess; I like the concept here, I just wish a less aggravating character was the one at the heart of it.
Then again, I’m sort of asking for the impossible – this is a story that couldn’t have happened with anyone else! Who else but the Ice King would tell someone he wants to be his friend, only to manipulate him in order to create brand new friends, only to turn on those new friends when they don’t take a liking to him?
Which I guess actually makes for a more interesting episode. Any other character would actually try to make friends with Life Giving Magus, or would only create friends in a moment of frustration, or would make more of an effort to get to know them… It’s only with a character like this that you can get a sequence of such terrible decisions and nonsensical reactions, and really delve into how such a dysfunctional person deals with this stuff.
Which is great cause it leads to a lot of fun with the Life Given Objects. I love how all of them come into the world with so much to them – personalities, complex thoughts, even accumulated knowledge of what IK gets up to in a very literal case of “if these walls had ears”. At the same time, I don’t know how interesting they’d be to watch if they didn’t have a fully formed personality bouncing off of them… But still, it’s fun seeing them each have their own quirks, especially the drum immediately questioning his own existence and the microwave having a drunk creation trip. And the lamp in particular is a delight as an optimistic existentialist trying to help IK through thinly veiled aggravation (relatable). Really, it just emphasizes how much he’s squandering his chance to be friends with these guys.
But then, I do also find myself empathizing with IK for how he copes with his new “friends” and how they treat him. It’s not easy feeling like the outsider, like the loser, like no one gets you or even tries to accept you as you are. And while he was a jerk to the rest, the way they treated him was really quite horrible itself; basically bullying masquerading as tough love.
My parents were just talking about my niece, and how a lot of the ‘terrible twos’ is about kids that age starting to have a much more complex understanding of things than vocabulary; that it’s the frustration of being unable to describe so much of what they think or feel. It’s similar for people who lose parts of their cognition or communication, and I think it’s the same for Simon. I wrote previously that he made the Evergreen / Ice King persona more caring, but I think he also made him more angry, or bitter. And Simon’s frustration at being stuck in his own body, while this complete dumbass ruins everything, manifests in IK as anger for not liking him or understanding him. So he wants friends who can just be his ‘bros’, to have only the shallowest and most self-aggrandizing connections; but he’s stuck with people Simon would probably have enjoyed a lot more, and he can’t handle it.
And so we end with the dumbass making another bad decision, turning down friendship with LGM yet again in favor of ‘friendship’ with his brainless book instead.
Stray Observations:
- Ice King mentions that he doesn’t like Abracadaniel anymore because “he kept trying to analyze me”. I bet he’d love me!
- Seriously, these guys are a hoot.
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