"world records" news and stories

We need more beer-related world records. I mean, come on, people: They are the Guinness World Records, right?

That's why I think we can all get behind this woman, a German barmaid who set a record for carrying the most tankards of beer at one time -- 19 of the giant beer-filled glasses lugged over 40 yards.

Anita Schwartz broke the record on Sunday, November 9th, just days before Guinness World Records Day which was celebrated on Thursday, November 13th. So yes -- oops! -- we missed it, but you can still see what records were toppled and mark your calendar for next year. Plus, there's even a "BREAK / SET A RECORD" button if you feel so inclined to try your hand at world recordship! [Writer's note: Despite its somewhat misleading moniker, clicking the button does not constitute breaking or setting a record.]

Just don't go chasing after Ms. Schwartz's claim to fame. After watching the video of her record-setting feat, I think she means business.

And you thought Guinness just brought us great beer!

I've never given much thought as to whether South Africans celebrate Thanksgiving. However, when I read that a team of bakers created what they're calling the the world's largest pumpkin pie last weekend, I'm beginning to think folks in Pretoria might just have their own version Thanksgiving.

The 1.15 ton treat took two days to make and bake and measured some 3 feet deep. It's worth noting that the pie's other dimensions were 28 feet long and 7 feet wide. While I'm all for the South Africans trying to break a record set by a group of U.S. farmers two years ago (pictured), someone needs to tell the South Africans that pies are round. If the dimensions I read are not a typo, the mammoth pumpkin pastry qualifies as a loaf with a crust, but not a pie. A ton of the orange gourd was used to make the "pie." As of press time, there's been no reports of how many pounds of Cool Whip were used to top the purported pie.

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If you were thinking about going for the world record in chocolate sculpture, you might have some extra work to do. Chef Alain Roby has just set a new World Record with his 6.6 meter tall (that's about 22 feet) chocolate sculpture that replicates the Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

The entire sculpture is made of more than 1000 kg of chocolate and took over 30 hours to build. Guinness representatives were present at the scene and have officially confirmed it as the world's tallest sculpture made from chocolate.

[via: Spluch]

Yep. To mark Moscow's 859th birthday on September 2, a team of 150 Russian cooks has baked a giant pizza model of the city. Even at a a scale of 1:50,000,000, the pizza is a whopping 22 square meters.

According to Alexei Kasin of Pizza Fabrika, the pizza "is made of 300 individual pieces, and according to the requirements for the (Russian) Book of Records, we entirely cover and cook each piece with cheese so that the surface is ideal.'' The pizza features a replica of key landmarks of the city, including the towers of the Kremlin. The pizza makers used canned corn for the streets, and food-colored mayonnaise for water.

Hey, if people can put kimchee on a pizza, there's nothing wrong with blue mayo!

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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