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A landmark study of the contents of American hot dogs revealed that 2% of those tested contained human DNA. As Americans eat an estimated 20 billion hot dogs every year, this means a staggering 4 million of these could be contaminated.

The study, conducted by Clear Food, used next-generation genomic technology to analyze foods at a molecular level, ingredient by ingredient. The aim was to confirm that the foods we eat contain the ingredients on the label. When it came to hot dogs, nearly 15% of those tested contained unlabeled ingredients - and in the case of 2%, that ingredient was human DNA.

In other cases, products labeled as vegetarian actually contained meat or meat-based products, and some contained other un-labeled fillers and additives.

Bizarrely, these errors were unrelated to the price of the hot dog - some of the cheaper products passed without issue, some of the higher end products failed miserably.

The issue brings to light a major problem of meat production in the US, and that is the astonishingly small number of slaughterhouses. In the past forty years, the number of slaughterhouses in America has declined from thousands of smallscale operations to just 13 - that's 13 slaughterhouses processing the majority of the meat eaten by 300 million Americans. As Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) explains:
"The slaughterhouses that the United States have are pretty unique in terms of the speed of production. We have slaughterhouses that will process 300, 400 cattle an hour, which is as much as twice as many as anywhere else in the world. And it's that speed of production that can lead to food-safety problems. When workers are working very quickly, they may make mistakes. It's during the evisceration of the animal, or the removal of the hide, that manure can get on the meat. And when manure gets on some meat, and then that meat is ground up with lots of other meat, the whole lot of it can be contaminated."
At the same time, thanks to repeated budget cuts, inspections of these slaughterhouses by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have fallen from 35,000 a year in the 1970s to just 3,400 a year today.

The impact of this is not only these relatively innocuous additional contents making it into our food, but also bacteria and waste products which can make us very sick, or even kill us. The New York Times reported on this issue, and how it contributes to increased incidences of food poisoning, writing:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 76 million Americans are sickened, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die each year because of something they ate.
The Clear Food study highlights a grim reality: the system of producing meat in the U.S. is unhealthy and unsustainable, and it needs to change. Much of the developed world is racing ahead of America in the safety and sustainability of its meat production, and we need to catch up.

You can watch the standard production of American hot dogs in the video below: