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After two long years, the world’s largest hot dog has triumphantly returned to New York City. Hot Dog: the second portion It is now on display in Duffy Square, a plaza within Times Square, and aligns with America’s 250th anniversary.
Conceptual artists Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw first unveiled the 65-foot-long sausage sculpture in 2024. It spent its summer parked in Times Square as part of their appropriately titled Hot dog in the city exhibition. Multiple events in front of the giant hot dog, including themed wrestling matches, Q&A interviews with food historians and local food vendors, and daily confetti cannon shooting from inside the hot dog. According to its creators, they hoped to use the “iconic symbol of New York City and American culture to examine class, consumption, capitalism, and the myths of the American dream.”
Of course, the return raises a very important question: how many current Could hot dogs fit into the huge American staple? Catron and Outlaw confirmed popular science that the interior of his 65-foot-long sculpture is approximately 6,000 cubic feet or 10,368,000 inches. The average Oscar Mayer is about six inches long with a diameter of one inch, making its volume about 4.7 cubic inches. Divide 10,368,000 by 4.7 and you get about 2.2 million hot dogs.
The math is not that easy, of course. In this hypothetical case, the hot dogs are packed inside the sculpture so that no empty space remains, a physical impossibility. To be generous, let’s assume that the packaging efficiency of Oscar Meyer sausages is about 80 percent, which means that the small spaces between the mountains of sausages waste about a fifth of the room. Taking this into account, a more “realistic” estimate would be around 1.75 million sausages.
Taking it a step further, the average American eats approximately 70 hot dogs per year. If Oscar Meyer (or any other hot dog purveyor) were feeling generous, filling Catron and Outlaw’s sculpture could supply 25,000 people in the United States with their annual quota. Just a suggestion.
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