"competitiveeating" news and stories

Already the master of hot dog eating, competitive eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi set a new world record with a different kind of sausage: bratwurst. He ate 58 bratwursts in 10 minutes, smashing the previous record of only 34 1/2 brats. He said that he really liked the brats, but they were a little harder to eat than hot dogs are, most likely this is because the dogs are eaten with buns, while the brats involve more chewing. Joey Chestnut, considered to be one of the up and coming stars of the sport, came in second with only 45 brats. The IFCOE has a breakdown of the prize money from the contest, revealing that Kobayashi took home $8,000 for his work.

And for anyone who's counting, the 160-lb Kobayashi ingested 16,820 calories, 1,450 grams of fat, along with 19 days' worth of the recommended (minimum) daily amount of sodium.

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A masters student at UC Berkeley, Mike Wooldridge, started thinking about the relatively young "sport" of competitive eating and noticed that there were many records, but no way to compare performance results across food groups. He set out to see if he could normalize, or standardize, the results from all types of eating contests and make it possible to compare the performance of the eaters across different foods.

Mike analyzed 23 records and converted them into a rate of ingestion (ROI), resulting in a kilograms per minute value for every food.

The blue bars are the average ROI of given foods (easier foods have higher bars) and the yellow bars are the eaters' records. The big spikes are some of world champion eater Takeru Kobayashi's records, but you can see that, because the rest of the yellow bars are approximately equal, the eaters mostly perform up to the same standards, despite the food involved in the challenge.

[via Trencherwomen]

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This week, competitive eater Pat Bertoletti set a new ice cream-eating world record by consuming 1.75 gallons in eight minutes. The ice cream used was vanilla from the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory.  Bertoletti, fourth in eater rankings,  also holds the records for key lime pie, chocolate and corned beef and cabbage.

It is possible to image eating almost any food quickly, even if you can't really conceive of doing it yourself. Ice cream, on the other hand, is not an easy food to eat because of the risk of brain freeze, the intense headache that results from consuming cold foods too quickly. Some of the eaters appeared to be affected by the cold, but Bertoletti ate the ice cream as though it were no colder than a pile of warm mashed potatoes. I'm not sure if "impressive" fully describes the performance, but watch the video to see for yourself.

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In all likelihood, quite a few people who are on the competitive eating circuit have blogs, but the blog of Skinnyboy is the first that I have come across. Ranked at #28, he blogs his training and various other food-related undertakings. Some of the posts are about his "stretches," which involve eating massive of foods like pasta, pudding and water, but many of the recent posts are geared towards one event: the May 18th Las Vegas qualifier for this year's annual Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest. The hot dog eating contest is something like the world cup of competitive eating and Skinnyboy is practicing. In fact, you can even watch a video clip of some of his sprints, but I think that just the shot of his refrigerator is enough to give you an idea of how serious he is about his sport.

I would be interested to see the blogs of any other competitive eaters, just for comparison. Anyone know of any?

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Salon.com currently features an interview with Ryan Nerz, author of Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit. The book chronicles Nerz's experiences and observations from having emceed several eating contests over the course of a year. What's even better is that there's another book out on the subject, entitled Horseman of the Esophagus. Incidentally, both have hot dogs on their covers. In the Salon interview, Nerz talks about some of the more hotly contested subjects in the world of competitive eating, namely the "belt of fat" theory, which tries to explain why thin people have better luck in eating competitions than larger folks.