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Queering Vegan
The Queer Politics of Vegan Hot Dogs
Every day during kindergarten, Marino Benedetto took a lunch meat sandwich to school and traded it in for peanut butter and jelly. At five years old, it was difficult to pinpoint why meat was so repellent but in the following year, when their first grade class trip arrived at a small farm to visit the animals, a seminal connection was forged between cow and hamburger, chicken and nugget. “I came home and I asked my mom, ‘When we eat chicken, this is what we’re actually eating?’ Because I finally saw a real life chicken,” recalls Benedetto. “I just remember it hit me that what I was eating was a dead life. And that it was wrong.”
Benedetto, the founder of Yeah Dawg, a Brooklyn-based vegan hot dog company, was a quiet kid who didn’t want to rock the boat so they staged a silent revolt against meat for six years, dodging it in their lunchbox and skirting around it on the dinner plate. By the ripe age of twelve, they chose to commit to vegetarianism and taught themself how to experiment in the kitchen with vegetables. In college, veganism followed and ran parallel with Benedetto’s exploration of queerness and gender studies. For them, coming out has been a process that’s steadily unfurled over the last 15 years. “My identity is complex and cannot be boiled down into a simple choice of male or female,” Benedetto wrote in an instagram post on national coming out day. Transitioning while running a small food business “has been a bit difficult,” they continued. “There are not many others like me.”
Each dawg is rolled by hand, which isn’t as romantic as it sounds, Benedetto admits, especially as the number of orders increases.
Production day inside of the commercial kitchen Yeah Dawg operates out of starts the same, give or take the changing schedule of food festivals, pop-ups and retail shipments. Beets, carrots and sweet potatoes are washed, hand-cut then roasted until their jewel tones darken and caramelize. Whole sunflower…
