Gorging for fun and profit

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, competitions, eating, gurgitators

In my college years, I got the nickname "Monumental Mouth" because of a scheduling problem that made it quite hard for me to eat more than once daily. I would eat dinner at my dorm, then run to another dorm and eat another dinner with friends. On occasion, when cooking for myself (which consisted of warming an unopened can in a saucepan on the stove), I would shovel in a 3 pound can of spaghetti. My friends thought that a lot.

I'm glad I never tried a contest. It never entered my mind. By the time I first heard of eating contests, the winners were eating upwards of ten pounds of "food" in ten or twelve minutes. More recently, a few really big eaters are approaching twenty pounds. Yow!

Jason Fagone, a journalist working freelance out of Philadelphia, was sent to cover an eating contest, sort of as a rest stop between more "serious" stories. He got to know a few eaters, and became fascinated (today he'd say, "morbidly..."). His book Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream chronicles a year he spent following the eating circuit, getting to know many major players, both eaters an promoters.

What can be told about a tiny Japanese guy who eats, bun and all, fifty hot dogs in twelve minutes? A tinier Korean-American woman who eats (not bones and all!) 160-plus hot wings in that same time period? Or a score of folks weighing up to 400 pounds that try their best to outeat one another, and especially these two Asians?

Author Fagone tells us as much as he can. Some folks, like Coondog O'Karma, "el Wingador", or Crawfish Nick, self-promote. A few, like "Eater X" Janus, are more retiring and serious. The most mysterious, both self-promoting and self-hiding, is Takeru Kobayashi, the Japanese marvel (eventually, Fagone learns that "Koby" trains with much larger masses of food than he expects to consume in a contest. None of the other eaters comes close).

Big-time competitive eating didn't start that long ago. There have been informal speed-eating contests for a very long time; one fellow claims two guys in a prehistoric cave had to try to out-consume each other as a survival tactic. You never know when the next mastodon will come along... But mass-marketed and -promoted competitive eating began in the US in the early 20th Century, or perhaps more in the middle...the early part of the backstory depends on the memory of just a couple of notoriously unreliable gents, the Shea brothers.

George Shea promotes IFOCE (International Federation of Competitive Eating), which he and his brother created just over ten years ago. Many contests run under their aegis, including the biggest, the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest at Coney Island, which is now covered by ESPN.

So is eating a sport? There is certainly money in it, now. The author is ambiguous. He seems to be bemused by the idea at first, then lean in favor, and finally lean away, or conclude it doesn't matter.

Late in the book I noticed certain palindromic structures: "Comedy equals tragedy plus time, and maybe tragedy equals comedy plus time" [p 240], or "Eating seemed like a highly entertaining but empty vice, its very emptiness made terrifying by its intensity, and its intensity made terrifying by its emptiness" [p 243]. Whenever I've seen such before, their vacant profundity indicates the writer is running out of ideas.

In the end, perhaps more than many endeavors, competitive eating exists for itself. It doesn'nt need to have meaning. People strive for recognition, and this is one way some folks achieve it. For them, I am glad; for the destruction it can cause to their health, I am not so glad, but I understand. For eaters, eating big is worth it.