Nutritional Annihilation
by Michael Penn

Despite what the food nazis at the Center for Science in the Public Interest might say, there's plenty of healthy stuff in bratwurst. Like niacin — a single, cooked pork bratwurst gives you a wallop of niacin, nearly 13 percent of your daily recommended intake. And thiamin ... don't even get me started on thiamin.

There's also an abundance of protein, for the Atkins fans, and maybe a whisper of potassium, which everyone needs for ... well, something. Beyond that, well, you don't want to know. The USDA nutritional values chart, which you can find on the least conspicuous corner of any package of brats, contains mostly bad news.

Which is why one should never inspect the nutritional values chart of a package of brats. Society does not gain, for example, from the knowledge that a single brat in a bun contains about 600 calories, even before mustard and onions. Or that nearly half of those calories are from fat. Or that if the Saturday night baseball game goes into extra innings and requires you to eat a third bratwurst, you've blown your saturated fat allowance through sometime Wednesday evening. Sausage eating is like sausage making, in that it's better left unexamined.

This runs counter to the dominant stream of postmodern culture, which is to deconstruct everything into a heaping pile of component parts. From our home audio systems to our fantasy baseball teams, most of us live by the credo that the parts matter as much as the whole — that everything gets better when it gets taken apart. We reduce politics, the environment, athletic events, works of great literature — even physical beauty — to statistics, slices and small pictures, revealing only the tiniest aspect of the whole.

And food .. we love reducing food. The cable Food Network is a 24-hour testament to the power of breaking down cuisine to little piles of ingredients. Should we add more arborio rice, or more cardamom? The shrimp diavolo is in the details.

But then there's sausage. No one knows what's in it. No one knows how it's made. In fact, according to Wisconsin sausage behemoth Usinger's, it's made by elves. Not even Keebler tries that crap with adult food.

The elf bit is part consumer protection (you don't want to know), but it's also symbolic of the cultural snobbery (we don't want to tell you) that permeates the encased meat industry. In Europe, where it's heresy to ask for a brat in Vienna or a mettwurst in Gdansk, you can navigate by tasting the sausage as well as you can with a map. Your particular blend of sausage is more than your meat of choice; it's your cultural identity on a hard roll. And that's increasingly true in the United States, too, where in the great melting pot, one way to preserve your individualism is to wrap it in casings.

I think this is why Milwaukee Brewers fans reacted with feverish paranoia when Randall Simon innocently rapped his baseball bat on the oversized foam head of the team's Italian sausage character. It's one thing to knock the team, the city, or the fans — but to knock the knockwurst? In Wisconsin — the state that gave us the Wienermobile — you don't joke about sausage. After the Simon incident, which toppled the girl in the Italian sausage costume and caused the one wearing the hot dog to fall over, Milwaukee cops actually led the poor guy off the field in handcuffs. And the next day, when the girl who portrayed the hot dog told reporters that she was relieved that she didn't suffer any injuries that would affect her career, several newspapers failed to report that she was a college volleyball player, apparently assuming that she was worried about her future in the running-hot-dog biz.

Simon came back later that year and, on the surface, all seemed forgiven. He even bought a couple hundred Italian sausages for fans behind first base. But I'm not so sure this has blown over. I hear whispers about angered Milwaukeeans who suspect Simon had it out for them all along. And maybe they're right. Simon, who grew up in Curacao, is probably an andouille guy. But God help him if he ever takes on the brat.

E-mail Michael Penn at mpenn@facstaff.wisc.edu.

— graphic by Alison Paddock (arpdesigns@hotmail.com)