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.
The post Here’s How Long It Would It Take Joey Chestnut To Eat This Massive Hot Dog Spill appeared first on The Autopian.
