It isn't that hard to eat two Dodger dogs, despite the fact that they are quite large, but they run only $4.75 (or $5.25 for all-beef) each. A soft pretzel is $3.50 and peanuts are $5. It seems like the average fan may not eat $35 worth of food, excluding beer, during a game.

The ticket prices this season for right field were $10 each and the left field bleachers will still be available at that price.

In the Krystal Square Off III World Hamburger Eating Contest in Chattanooga, Tennessee this past weekend, Takeru Kobayashi brought home another championship title by eating 97 hamburgers in 8 minutes. Joey Chestnut came in second, finishing with 91 hamburgers, followed by Patrick Bertoletti in third with 76. All the numbers are up hugely from last year's contest, in which Kobayashi narrowly beat Chestnut with a final total of 67-62 burgers. One other big change from previous years was that the contest was televised on ESPN2, which gives the sport a much wider audience and much more publicity than it enjoyed before.

The contest is known as the "square off" because the burgers that the competitors wolf down are square, but Krystal's burgers hosts the contest because they have been holding eating contests at their stores since the first one opened in 1932. According to company legend, the tradition was set when the second customer challenged the first customer to a head-to-head hamburger showdown.

It looks like Ohio State isn't the only college football team that's going to get their own brand of cereal this season. The University of Florida Gators are getting a line of Frosted Flakes Corn Cereal, which are a limited edition item to commemorate 100 years of Gator football. The cereals will be available at 250 Publix markets throughout the state.

Some fans are buying it for the box, which could be something of a collectors' item to a die-hard fan, but others are simply buying the cereal because they like frosted flakes for breakfast. No matter what the reason behind the purchases, Publix says that the cereals are selling quickly and that they expect to see sales climb throughout the season or until the stocks, since it was produced in a limited run, run out.

With football season starting up, you might want a few new ideas for snack foods because even though we all know that you're not supposed to be chowing down on munchies in front of the TV, it's probably going to happen when you have friends over and are watching your college football on ESPN. Wing It!: Delectable Recipes for Everyone's Favorite Bar Snack is a book devoted entirely to chicken wings - with an eye on snacking, of course. The recipes range from those you're probably familiar with already, like Classic Buffalo Wings, and ones that use some international flavors, such as Grilled Coconut Wings with Thai Peanut Dipping Sauce. Some of the recipes are battered in some way, while others are not, and a few make use of an alternative coating, like the Mexican-Style Tortilla Chicken Wings, which use tortilla chips to create a crispy coating. There are quite a few barbecued wings with delicious-sounding sauces, as well. Speaking of sauces, there are also a number of recipes for dips, so you won't have to be stuck with bottle bleu cheese or ranch on the side every time you serve the wings.

First of all you need a crockpot, a large T.V. at the very least, and probably cable. Where I live one of the Networks comes in unacceptably snowy via antenna. For quick, easy dishes check these crock recipes at Out of the Frying Pan. Use your imagination and plenty of cheese to personalize things. Food coloring, shaped or sculptured dipping foods, etc. Here are a few more tips:

• Watch with friends; if you drink, make it light beer. You'll get plenty of carbs and calories from all the snacks.
• Don't start throwing food at your friends until the third quarter. Don't throw cheese in any form, hors d'oeuvres dipped in cheese, or the crockpot.

A 20-year old Celtic supporter in Scotland is very devoted to his team and has taken his devotion far beyond the standards set be even the most die-hard tailgaters. He has vowed to eat only foods that are in the club's colors for the 2006/2007 season, meaning that he has eaten a diet of salad, green vegetables and white meat (mostly chicken and a little fish) since July.

Clearly, the young man, Scott Campbell, is lucky that there are actually quite a few foods that come in green and white. Had the team colors been blue and silver, he would have been wise to come up with another way to express his loyalty.

Does anyone else have any other dedication-through-food stories, or is Campbell the only one who has taken it this far?

When the school year starts back up, sports fans can look foward to a new season of college football. In addition to cheering on their team at games, fans of the Ohio State Buckeyes will get a new way to show their spirit: Buckeye HerOes cereal, the breakfast cereal with OSU current and former players on the box. The honey-nut-toasted-oat cereal sounds exactly like similar to a well-known national brand, so it probably won't take much for fans to hand over the $3.49 at Kroger stores for a box. OSU is not the first university to do a cereal promotion, but their 75,000 box run of product is the largest to-date and the manufacturer says that more will be produced if the initial fun sells out, with a production run once or twice a year.

OSU's next branded product is expected to be single-serving milk cartons.

One of the fun things about bundt pans is that they come in so many different shapes - far more than an ordinary cake pan. The problem with this is that you can end up with too many pans, some of which are only really appropriate for certain occasions and the Holiday Tree bundt is a prime example of this. The Stadium Pan does not have this problem, even though it does have an undeniably unique shape, since there are sporting events running all year long. All you need to do is make sure the icing colors match the team that you're supporting before the match, and you can root for your favorite team while you and your friends chow down.

As the number of teams in the World Cup narrows, the anticipation to see who will win is growing, as is the desire of the players to win the World Cup for their country. If you're not on one of the advancing teams (and odds are good that you're not if you have the time to read this right now), the only way you're going to get your hands on a World Cup is if you buy a chocolate one. Shown with the creator/chocolatier, the chocolate World Cup is made of both milk and dark chocolates and weighs more than 5kg. It is hand-sculpted and covered in edible gold dust for an authentic and tasty look.

The base price for the trophy is £75, but that only includes shipping within the UK. If you're in Europe, the cost with shipping will be £100, and a whopping £125 ($227) to the US.

At least it's less expensive than the real thing!

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]

If you're a football (soccer) fan, chances are that you've been watching the World Cup qualifiers and can't wait for the finals to begin in June. To support your favorite team and show your enthusiasm for the sport, check out the Football Bowl from Mixko. It is an earthenware bowl cast from a deflated football, giving it an authentic look without that rubber/leather smell that would result from trying to use a real football as a bowl. It's a great way to serve chips or other munchies during the game. The bowls are £50 each, but that's still a lot cheaper than flying to Germany to watch the games live.

A study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association indicated that teens who are involved in athletic programs have healthier eating habits than those who are not involved in sport. The findings indicated that both the athletic boys and girls were more likely to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, not skipping meals and making healthier choices than their peers, though many of the girls still did not meet their nutritional requirements for calcium and iron.

The study was conducted by the Eating Disorders institute in Minnesota and, surprisingly, concluded that students in weight-based sports, such as wresting and gymnastics, had even better eating habits than other athletes. Researchers dismissed concerns that these pressures often lead to eating disorders, saying "it may be that youth involved in sports at a less elite level of athletics, such as the junior high and high school levels, are able to maintain better nutrient profiles than athletes involved at an elite level."

Budweiser is official beer of World Cup, the most internationally watched sporting event in the world. They bought the rights for the 2002 and 2006 games for about $80 million in 1998 - before they knew where those games were to be hosted. The problem is that this year's World Cup is hosted by Germany and Germans don't like Budweiser.

For Germans, beer and football (soccer, for the Americans) go hand in hand and Germans are some of the biggest beer drinkers in the world - with many outstanding brews coming from their own country. The prospect of having to drink only Budweiser at the games was something of a slap in the face to German brewers. One fan, cited the Wall Street Journal, even said "This is just the worst beer you could imagine." Bad publicity poured from fans and the press. And to make matters worse, the beer had to be sold as "Anheuser Busch Bud" because of a legal battle over the Budweiser name rights with a Czech brewer that makes "Budweis" beer.

With the prospect of millions of potential beer drinkers, both in stadiums and at home, Budweiser knew they had to do something. Fast.