Food Food Food! Eat Eat Eat!

"Food Food Food! Eat Eat Eat!", May 2008.

There are competitions out there that judge how quickly you can cram somewhat obscene amounts of food into your stomach. They are called speed eating competitions. Have you ever watched an eating contest? It is amazing how quickly these participants consume food in order to win world records. Recently, the McMaster Daily News reported that we too have a speed eater in our midst here at Mac. Fourth year mechanical engineering student Peter Czerwinski is one of these competitors, and won the The Collegiate Nationals Eating Championship on April 19^th.

Furious Pete, as he is also known consumed two hotdogs, two hamburgers and a quarter pound of French fries in seven minutes, allowing him to win this year’s title. This was his first professional eating competition, but not his first professional competition, as Czerwinski has entered some body building workshops as well.

You always think that something like this would occur far away from McMaster, and Hamilton...but apparently eating competitions are not as weird and unusual as one may think. Speed eating is not a recent phenomenon. Pie eating contests at country fairs are what speed eating spawned from. The sport (yes, it is considerd a sport) has actually been increasing in popularity since the turn of the millennium.

One of the most famous is the Japanese man Takeru Kobayashi, who holds several world records. From July 2001 to July 2007, Kobayashi won fifteen out of sixteen competitions, including his first. Since then however it seems that Kobayashi has not done much competing.

Technically though, Kobayashi won fifteen out of seventeen competitions. In one competition, he faced a 1089 lb Kodiak bear. Kobayashi at 192 lb ate 31 bun-less hotdogs in 2 minutes 23 seconds compared to the 50 the bear consumed. Yeah, he got smoked, but he was in a race against a BEAR. I don’t know how many of you have actually seen bears close up, but they are big. And Kodiak bears are bigger than most. I still call it a remarkable achievement. You can watch the YouTube video to see what I mean.

I’m sort of curious as to how people could figure out that they can stuff food down their throat really fast without vomiting. Or even teach the body how to eat that much in one sitting without being sick, or becoming morbidly obese from consuming all of the calories. I’m not going to try it though.