Tradition that has stood the test of time, Independence Day Hot-Dog eating competition

Americans eat 150 million hot dogs each year on the Fourth of July. That’s enough hot dogs to make a line from Washington, DC to Los Angeles five times.

The tradition of eating hot dogs on Independence Day was inspired by a gut-churning annual event: Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. The contest, though, is shrouded in lies. Every Independence Day, Nathan’s Famous, a hot dog company, hosts an eating contest on Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York.

 According to legend, it has hosted the competition almost every year on the Fourth of July since 1916. “To settle an argument over who was the most p

“We get hundreds of millions in PR value,” Norbitz told The Wall Street Journal. The original Nathan’s stand on Coney Island sells 26,000 hot dogs alone on the day of the contest, according to the Journal.

atriotic, legend has it that four immigrants held a hot dog eating contest at our famous Coney Island stand,” Nathan’s website says.

“The story that I have heard forever is that there were four immigrants arguing over who was the most American on the Fourth of July,” says the president of Major League Eating, which runs Nathan’s hot dog eating competition.

NBC, ESPN, and The New York Daily News all also uncritically cite the baloney story about the first contest being held in 1916. In fact, there is no evidence of Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest being held in any year before 1972.

Mortimer Matz, a longtime public relations professional, told The New York Times in 2010 the truth about the contest’s backstory: He just made it up. Matz told the Times, “We said this was an annual tradition since 1916. In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up.” In a 2016 interview with the Associated Press, former Nathan’s president Wayne Norbitz owned up to the lie.

“Our objective was to take a photograph and get it in the New York newspaper,” Norbitz said. “We’d honestly wait for a couple of fat guys to walk by and ask them if they wanted to be in a hot dog contest.” The early 1970s contests weren’t even always held on the Fourth of July.

Ones in 1972, 1975, and 1978 were held on Memorial Day and Labour Day. By the 1980s, Nathan’s started hosting their contest on Independence Day regularly. And with that, it successfully tied the food to the holiday.