The other day, I was eating a demoralizing lunch of baby carrots and Fritos when a colleague shared a photo in Slack. I couldn’t quite make out what I was looking at: There appeared to be four baby pink hamburgers on a wooden cutting board, alongside small bowls of condiments. What my colleague said next shook me to my core: They were hot dogs. But round. They were called round dogs. They were hamburger-shaped hot dogs. My brain short-circuited.

The round dogs were from Rastelli’s, a sustainable meat and seafood purveyor, and they cost $10 for four three-ounce ″burgers.” As a lifelong scholar of hot dogs and hot dog-related issues, I was at once scandalized by this departure from tradition and frustrated with myself for not knowing about it sooner. Above all, I was excited to bear witness to this moment in hot dog history, knowing that I could one day tell my grandkids where I was when the round dogs first went viral — eating baby carrots and Fritos off my lap. To process my emotions I logged onto the internet, a famously healthy place to work through stuff, and posted the dogs to Twitter.