Gluttons for punishment

Nov. 20, 2004. Harrah’s, Maryland Heights, Mo. A modest crowd of about 100 in the casino convention hall looks on, bemused, as the emcee introduces each competitor. Eric “Badlands” Booker. Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas. Tim “Eater X” Janus. “Crazy Legs” Conti. And the rest. Oh. My. God. They are all here. All my heroes on the competitive-eating circuit. I am not bemused. I am agog. Booker once ate 49 doughnuts in one sitting. Janus was profiled on The Science of Speed Eating on the National Geographic Channel. Thomas has eaten 11 pounds of cheesecake in competition – 11 pounds! It’s just not right! Each one has a nutty backstory, too. The 420-pound Booker has recorded an album of competitive-eating-inspired rap songs, Hungry & Focused. Janus wears a mask to protect his identity (although his real name is Tim Janus). Conti once tried to eat his way out of a “sarcophagus of popcorn” for a TV show. Thomas is a true oddity – an elfin, 105-pound Burger King manager from Alexandria, Va., capable of ingesting and digesting one-eighth her weight. The motley group of speed eaters has traveled to St. Louis to take on toasted ravioli. They will do to the quirky fried appetizer that defines our burg what a pride of starved lions used to do to Christians. A retinue of waiters lofting great silver platters heaped with toasted ravs parades to the front of the room. The ravioli, fried downstairs at the Charlie Gitto’s Italian restaurant at Harrah’s, is weighed out by the plateful and placed before each eater at a long banquet table. The gluttons’ race is about to begin. I’m so excited I’m going to plotz. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that there are lots of people who are decidedly turned off by what is about to happen. Eating as much and as fast as you can is obscene. It is wasteful. It is, in a word, gross. The origin of organized eating contests is most likely the pie-eating contests that have figured at county fairs for the last hundred years or so. Then there are informal local contests like the one at Pointer’s Pizza in Richmond Heights (a team of two wins $500 if they can eat the 28-inch, 10-pound Pointersaurus pizza in an hour) or Talayna’s in Chesterfield (an individual wins $1,000 if he can eat the 30-inch, 14-pound pizza plus two pitchers of soda). A kooky entrepreneur named George Shea created the International Federation of Competitive Eating, or IFOCE, in 1997 to join these festival and restaurant contests into a loose network. His world-class “gurgitator” athletes travel from contest to contest, setting records and eating enough calories for a week in timed implosions. Whether you find this unsavory or you want to stand in the front row and cheer as people eat until they’re in pain, you have to admit there’s something telling about eating contests. Americans continue to grow fatter and unhealthier. We live in what has been famously described by one scientist as “a toxic food environment” of “high-calorie, high-fat, heavily marketed, inexpensive and readily accessible foods.” The gurgitators rarely gorge on broccoli or rice cakes in competition. It’s usually burritos, pumpkin pie, hamburgers and such. Their frantic race to pack in as much fattening fare as possible is a perfect microcosm of modern America. Truly, their ability to “consume mass quantities,” as Beldar Conehead often advised on Saturday Night Live, is a kind of nightmare fantasy. If demolition derby is a catharsis for our desire to ram the jerk on the highway who doesn’t use his turn signal, the gutbusting eaters turn our desire to eat an entire box of Twinkies at once into a spectator sport. Eating until you are literally about to burst – it’s as American as Thanksgiving, apple pie and diabetes. And this month, it’s our patriotic duty. Our Independence Day picnics are cornucopias of burgers, baked beans, potato salad and, of course, hot dogs. The Nathan’s Famous International July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest is the Super Bowl of competitive eating. Held annually since 1916, it’s now televised on ESPN, and is easily the premier event of the IFOCE season. Last year, a young man named Joey Chestnut with a bottomless pit for a stomach ate 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes to claim the coveted Mustard Yellow Belt. Watching him push hot dogs into his maw with unholy speed, I understood this was eating in name alone. Chestnut and his ilk don’t savor their food – they sacrifice it. Flash back to five years ago in St. Louis. The toasted-ravioli eat-off is just getting under way. Pro eaters Thomas and Booker are putting away plate after plate of food. They actually seem to be eating faster than the waiters can serve them. The crowd is screaming the names of its favorites. One by one, lesser lights stop eating, completely stuffed. Finally, after 12 long minutes of messy mastication, Thomas is declared the winner. The Black Widow has eaten 4 pounds of heavy, breaded toasted ravioli to best the field of two dozen eaters, including some men four times her weight. She is unreal. The whole thing is unreal: eating as an extreme sport. It can turn my hunger to disgust – kind of like the anticipation that precedes a good meal, followed by the regret of overeating. But every July 4, I watch the hot-dog-eating freak show on ESPN. It’s sort of an addiction, really. I just can’t seem to stop. Byron Kerman gave up his dream of being a Chinese-buffet eating champ after consuming four plates of crab Rangoon and playing ultimate Frisbee shortly thereafter; it did not end well. Now he writes articles, poems, plays and comedy sketches.