Anyone who makes jokes about sausages being of questionable origin hasn’t looked at a grocery store or restaurant lately. There’s no mystery meat to be found in the current generation of sausages. Instead, there is top-quality meat, occasionally combined with fruits, vegetables, cheeses and more, and spiced to reflect tastes and recipes from around the world. Old World sausages are still, and will always remain, popular, but given the creativity of today’s sausagemakers, exotic flavors abound.
According to a 2010 study from Information Resources Inc., sausages are enjoying remarkable sales, and those sales figures are still on the rise. Figures for 2010 show that dinner sausage retail sales increased 3.4 percent, with more than 1.85 billion in sales. Breakfast sausage sales increased as well, at more than 9 million in sales. The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council found in a survey that the residents of the Deep South consume the most dinner sausage, followed by the Northeast.