A Short History of America’s Competitive Eating Tradition: NPR
The traditional 4th of July hot dog eating contest got us thinking about why food and the holidays are so intertwined. Some experts have delved into the subject of competitive eating.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today is one of America’s best holidays to eat. There’s Thanksgiving, sure, but the 4th of July brings serious barbecues and the event that’s the de facto Super Bowl of competitive eating – the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. Miki Sudo won the women’s competition for the ninth time this morning, and this afternoon, after a rain and lightning delay…
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GEORGE SHEA: With 62 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes, for his 16th win, I give you the world’s No. 1 ranked eater, Joey Chestnut.
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SUMMERS: Why are these two doing it? Well, they have their reasons. But why do we as a society celebrate all of this on US Independence Day – well, our producer, Matt Ozug, spoke to experts on the subject of competitive eating.
JASON FAGONE: Sometimes I wake up in the morning and remember I spent two years in the 2000s tracking competitive meals across the country and the world.
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FAGONE: You know, I saw things that I could never forget even if I wanted to.
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FAGONE: My name is Jason Fagone and I am the author of “Horsemen Of The Esophagus: Competitive Eating And The Big Fat American Dream”.
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FAGONE: Most people are familiar with the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating contest. It’s the one that airs every year on ESPN. But there are all kinds of other eating contests…
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UNIDENTIFIED ADVERTISER #1: Cheeseburger Eating Champion…
FAGONE: …For the burgers, for the cakes, for the cannolis…
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Twenty-three cannoli in last year’s showdown.
FAGONE: …fries…
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UNIDENTIFIED ADVERTISER #2: World French Fries Eating Championship.
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FAGONE: …Just the craziest, most grotesque, most absurd type of contests, you know, and the kind of fun contests I’ve ever had the chance to attend.
One of the most intense experiences of my life was attending the Philadelphia Wing Bowl, the nation’s premier chicken wing eating contest – fifteen to twenty thousand true fans packed into a sports arena in Philadelphia at 7 a.m. in the morning. Then there’s this whole other aspect of eating contests in Japan.
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UNIDENTIFIED ADVERTISER #3: Food Fight Club…
FAGONE: They come with greatly expanded production values. There’s, you know, lasers and explosions and, you know, dramatic music. There’s a lot more ingenuity in the kind of structuring of the contest itself, whereas in America, contests tend to be more of just a kind of volume. Competitive eating dates back centuries. It’s not just an American thing.
ERIC GRUNDHAUSER: We have traces of a famous competitive eater dating back to the 17th century.
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GRUNDHAUSER: My name is Eric Grundhauser and I am a writer and journalist. There was a farmer named Nicholas Wood. Some of the impressive meals Wood was known to have consumed included consuming seven dozen rabbits in one sitting, whole pigs, 12 loaves of bread soaked in beer. He passed out afterwards, but he made it through.
Wood has earned a number of pretty incredible nicknames – The Most Exorbitant Paunchmonger, Duke All Paunch and the Kentish Tenter Belly. Unfortunately, his body was pretty much destroyed by everything he had eaten. He had lost all but one of his teeth after trying to eat a whole mutton shoulder. Wood finally threw in the towel and said, I can’t do this anymore.
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FAGONE: There are a lot of different cultures that kind of invented eating contests independently at different times in history. And for the few hundred years following the American Revolution, eating contests were a regular feature of July 4th celebrations. And then that started to change a bit in the 1970s when Nathan’s Famous hot dogs created a 4th of July hot dog contest. You know, the eaters back then were mostly fat guys from Long Island, right? They are, like, the classic kings of the backyard barbecue. And in the 1990s, these two New York brothers took over the accounts of Nathan’s Famous – George and Richard Shea. And at that time, everyone who entered the contest was kind of in on it. The eaters had silly nicknames. There was a guy named Frank “Large” De La Rosa.
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DOMINIC CARDO: Dominic “The Doginator” Cardo.
FAGONE: Ed “Cookie” Jarvis.
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CHARLES HARDY: “Hungry” Charles Hardy, Brooklyn, NY
FAGONE: Eric “Badlands” Booker.
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ERIC BOOKER: (Rapping) Quench my thirst at will and do it in record time.
FAGONE: …who is also a rapper and records competitive food-themed rap songs.
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BOOKER: Someone who says drink this drink.
FAGONE: I have a CD somewhere in my box of recordings here.
And then in 2001, everything changed in an instant…
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FAGONE: …When this young Japanese boy named Takeru Kobayashi came to America and participated in Nathan’s Hot Dog Contest. Kobayashi was unlike anyone who had come before him. You know, he wasn’t a great man. He looked very healthy. He didn’t have a prankish nickname, did he? And it turned out that he had trained for the contest as if it were a real sport.
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FAGONE: Part of Kobayashi’s innovation is that he found a whole new way to eat hot dogs. He separated the hot dog from the bun, then he broke the hot dogs in half. And then he would break the bun in half, dip it in water and eat it.
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FAGONE: It was an innovation that looked like, you know, the Fosbury flop in the high jump.
The record at that time was 25 hot dogs in 12 minutes, which everyone thought was a huge amount. The contest begins. Everything is going as usual. And then about three minutes later, everything stops. And not just the other contestants, but the announcer – they just start staring at Kobayashi with kind of an open jaw. Kobayashi had almost broken the world record and there were still nine minutes left to play.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The kid is amazing. A total beating of the Americans. He was like a treadmill. He was just putting them in two at a time.
FAGONE: And then he doubled the world record at the end of 12 minutes.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: …Started waving the white flag.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I can’t believe it. The record – new record – 50.
FAGONE: And then after that, everything changed because there started to be real money. Soon, you know, ESPN was broadcasting the hot dog contest live.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #4: What a crowd here. Americans of all persuasions. There are foreign visitors once again celebrating the dream of independence at the corner of Surf & Stillwell.
FAGONE: And with that money came a whole new wave of competitors who, you know, like Kobayashi, were training. They took it seriously as a sport, and they weren’t necessarily into the joke anymore. They were really trying to win.
Eating is one of the great psychic preoccupations of our species. It’s right there with sex and death. I mean, eating is this animal act that we all participate in to some degree, and it’s the most animal version of it, but it happens in an environment where there are safety rules. So, in a way, it’s, like, this show of gluttony that’s kind of been made safe for you to watch and think about. There’s, like, this safety glass between you and danger.
If you zoom out and think about, you know, what an eating contest perhaps symbolizes more broadly, it seems symbolic of America’s inordinate appetite for everything – and not just for food but for resources, power, money – you name it. It’s a kind of Rorschach test to find out how people see us.
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SUMMERS: Jason Fagone is the author of “Horsemen Of The Esophagus: Competitive Eating And The Big Fat American Dream.”
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