ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 10, 1996 TAG: 9604100008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MOLLY O'NEILL NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
If history is any indication, Sunday night the whoosh of the first pitch thrown this baseball season was accompanied by the sound of peanut shells crunching between fidgety fingers, the rip of Crackerjack boxes, and the chomping of thousands of hot dogs in stadiums across the land.
Or was it? =rt Like a dark cloud moving closer and closer toward a ball park, dietitians are raining fire and brimstone on traditional fan fare. They are trying to do to hot dogs what they have done to almost all of our national eating rituals - ruin them by talking about their diabolical dietary effects.
What American can dive with abandon into roadside barbecue, or sink into a fried chicken picnic or anticipate a juicy burger from back-yard grill without the word ``greasy'' echoing like the warning of a stern school marm in their minds?
Even popcorn, movie's food du place, is not exempt. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has found that the seemingly innocent buttered kernels are, in fact, a vehicle for more fat grams than a Big Mac.
But don't despair. Health advocates have a formidable adversary in the irresistible force called ``situational eating.''
People who normally wouldn't think of consuming bad foods will happily eat franks at ball parks, popcorn at the movies and cotton candy at the circus. They consume these foods for no other reason than that they are available and traditional.
Psychologists equate it with ``impulse eating,'' and they see it as a grave affront to rational, scientific eating. And of course they are right.
Consider, for instance, the obliviousness to consuming superfluous sugar that recently was exhibited by a young man at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden who was happily tugging a cloud of cotton candy:
``Do you like cotton candy?''
``Not really.''
``Are you hungry?''
``No, I'm at the circus.''
How can dietitians compete with such unconsciousness?
Over the past decade, ball park vendors have offered health-conscious and gourmet items, said Joel White, the director of merchandising for the New York Yankees.
But the fans weren't buying any of it. Hot dogs, beer and soda still comprise 70 percent of all food concession sales at Yankee Stadium.
While it is close to impossible to gauge the precise number of hot dogs sold daily, White estimates that he serves about 600,000 hot dogs annually and knows for sure that ``if you took all the hot dogs they serve in a season and laid them end to end, they'd reach from Yankee Stadium to Camden Yards.''
Conversations with concessionaires at the Baltimore stadium suggested that the hot dogs sold there in a season might stretch to Pittsburgh, where, in turn, a season's worth of hot dogs sold could extend approximately to Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati.
Dennis Robarge, assistant general manager for the Salem Avalanche, estimated that 140,000 hot dogs are devoured in Salem Memorial Baseball Stadium during the Avalanche's 70-game season. That's 140 miles' worth, which would reach to - hey, Woodstock! - Virginia.
In fact, if the hot dogs sold in a season in all the nation's ball parks formed a highway, the road would connect every major league ball park in the country.
And that is at least 15,600,000 hot dogs a year. Facing these sorts of numbers in impulsively consumed fat, nutritionists and psychologists are doing their best to help fans untangle the impulses that have paved the national hot dog highway.
At first, convenience played no small role in the popularity of hot dogs. Like sipping soda through a straw, eating a hot dog allows fans to keep their eyes on the ball rather than on the repast.
But now there are other choices. And yet, no hand-held snack - no burrito, no easily cradled pizza slice, no mess-free sushi - challenges the supremacy of ball park franks.
The Avalanche can attest to that. Robarge said nachos and cheese and pizza do respectable sales, though nowhere near that of franks. But hamburgers absolutely never caught on in this region, he said, while barbecue sandwiches, first offered about three years ago, get a fair number of requests.
Nutritionists have wondered if perhaps people are attracted to hot dogs because their large quantities of salt (approximately 675 milligrams per frank) replenish the liquids sweated out in the hot sun of a day game. Trouble is, franks sell as briskly in the cool evenings.
Maybe then it's the bun. Nutritionists have considered that the carbohydrate content of the hot dog bun might act as a sedative to overzealous fans. But Mara Esteroff Marano, the editor of Psychology Today and author of ``Style is not a Size'' (Bantam, 1991), points out that carbohydrates only function as a calming agent when they are eaten with very little protein, which is not the case with any self-respecting ball park frank.
Marano believes that the physiology of the brain may explain the ball park hot dog urge better than the cellular demands of muscles and glands.
``Sports are a primitive ritual of aggression and release, the id hangs out,'' she says. ``In such a situation, the primitive part of the brain, `Me want hot dog,' overrides the restraints of the more rational part of the brain, which would say `Am I hungry?' or `Would I like a hot dog?' ''
Maybe cognitive therapy would help fans outsmart the primitive brain and make sensible food choices, says Dr. David Garner, a professor at Bowling Green State University and author of the forthcoming ``Handbook of Psychotherapy for Eating Disorders'' (Guilford).
But, he adds, neither mind games nor simulated hot dogs will change the fact that what serves the cells doesn't necessarily sate the soul in social or ritualistic eating situations.
Nutritional considerations can't compete with the macro-social impact of eating certain foods in certain places at certain times.
Since about 1900 when, as folklore has it, Harry M. Stevens placed a sausage in a bun and peddled the sandwich for a dime at the New York City Polo Grounds, hot dogs have been the holy communion of the church of baseball.
To eat a frank is to join a community of fans, to be a link in the history of the national past time, to be a part of rather than apart from.
I realized this when I took a sushi picnic to opening day at Yankee Stadium in 1995. Stares and coughs and gagging sounds emanated from fans in the surrounding seats, dashing my self-satisfied sense of virtue.
Bite by bite, I was ``the other'' - the one too self-centered to honor the intricate habits and mores, the repetition, the cooperation, the consistency that add up to fan power, esprit du corps.
Tekamaki, I am sure, cost the Yankees a pennant. The weight of a hot dog could never compare to the burden of my guilt. This year I'll have two with everything. No, make that three. And some peanuts and Crackerjacks. Keep the change.
recipe for:
BALLPARK SOUP
- FOOD EDITOR ALMENA HUGHES CONTRIBUTED INFORMATION TO THIS STORY
LENGTH: Long : 126 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Steve Stinson. color.by CNB