Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-centered planet on a five-star scale.

I'm John Green, and today I'll be reviewing two forms of ingesting poisons.

On the one hand, we have chemotherapy, a medical intervention to treat cancer.

On the other hand, we have a hot dog eating contest.

Let's begin at the corner of surf and still well avenues in Brooklyn's Coney Island,

home to Nathan's Famous, a restaurant that started out in 1916 as a hot dog stand run

by Polish immigrants, Nathan and Ida Handwerker.

The hot dogs were made from Ida's recipe, and if they tasted like a contemporary Nathan's

Famous Hot Dog, they were fine.

Nathan's Famous Hot Dog is not the best food you will ever eat, or even the best hot dog

you will ever eat.

But there's something special about the experience of eating one, the brackish smell of the

Atlantic Ocean in your nose, the fading din of the once great Coney Island in your ears.

And the hot dogs do have a pedigree.

They've been eaten by King George VI and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Stalin even supposedly

ate one at the Yalta Conference in 1945.

Coney Island used to be the Huckster Capital of the World, where fast-talking barkers wearing

straw hats would sell you on this carnival attraction, or that one.

Now, like all places that survive on nostalgia, it's mostly a memory of itself.

The beaches are still packed in summertime, there's still a line at Nathan's Famous, and

you can still ride the carousel, but they're not selling fun anymore.

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