Lift Up Your Hearts!

What could be more American than hot dogs?

Lawsuits, apparently.

I bought a package of hot dogs yesterday.  I'm probably a little behind the times—we don't eat hot dogs very often—but since when did they come with warning labels?  Not the kind of warning I might expect, e.g. "this product is full of fat and dangerous additives, and is made from parts of the animal you don't want to know about," but the following:

Come again? You must be six years old to eat a hot dog?  I remember the day when hot dog-shaped meat sticks were a staple toddler "first finger food" in the baby food section of the grocery store.  Not that we ever bought them:  they were disgusting.  But there they were.  Clearly, somebody sued somebody over a hot dog incident, and now we get warning labels.

The chief problem with such inanities is that they lead to a cavalier attitude towards all warning labels.  In between "children under six must have their hot dogs cut into tiny pieces" and "remove plastic from pizza before putting into oven," someone's going to miss "poison—do not drink."