Americans are racing to get stuffed

Before I even opened this book, which is about one of the fastest growing “sports” in America, competitive eating, I thought: ah, I know this scene. I remembered the mainstay of my school’s summer show: a cream-cracker-eating competition, which was always a hoot because you might see Reed, the German teacher, half choking to death on a load of crumbs. As it turns out, however, I knew not a thing. Horsemen of the Esophagus, which is nothing if not committed to its subject, takes you way, way beyond cream crackers. It takes you to a world where a ruptured stomach — which, should it be mistaken for chronic indigestion, leads to almost certain death — is a definite possibility. It takes you, in other words, to a place you might rather not visit. It made me feel sick.

Its author, Jason Fagone, is a magazine journalist from Philadelphia, the home of a chicken-wing-eating competition known as the Wing Bowl — and it was this feast of flesh and bones that first piqued his interest in competitive eating. But then, having surfed a few Web sites, he became inexplicably hooked on the whole culture of it — the Lord alone knows why. The only plausible reason I can come up with is that suitable subjects for gonzo journalism are pretty thin on the ground these days, and Fagone is an aspiring young disciple of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe (it is the latter whom he impersonates the most convincingly). Then again, he doesn’t actually indulge himself. The nearest he gets to dealing with 50 hot dogs in one sitting is when he mashes a load together with some water in a plastic container that has the same capacity, theoretically, as a human stomach. Yeuch!

Here are a few competitive eating facts. There are 75 official events — that is, sanctioned by the International Federation of Competitive Eating — on the sport’s US calendar, for which the total prize money in 2004 was US$60,000; by last year, this figure had swollen to more than US$160,000, a large proportion of which was picked up by a South Korean immigrant, Sonya Thomas. Many of the competitions are screened on the sports channel ESPN, and are watched by millions. But for the sport’s advocates and administrators, this is merely the tip of the iceberg: they would like competitive eating to take its rightful place at the Olympics. “I strongly believe that we have overtaken curling in the overall pantheon of sports,” says George Shea, the chairman of the Federation. “And I think tennis is next.” As a publicity stunt for a Spam-eating contest, Shea once organized an Olympic-style “torch run” using a can of Spam mounted on a chair leg.

Fagone is fascinated by this stuff — a little too fascinated — and travels across the US in hot pursuit of the champs he calls the “Four Horsemen of the Esophagus”: Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, David “Coondog” O’Karma, Eric “Badlands” Booker and, most surprisingly of all, a New York trader called Timothy “Eater X” Janus. During this odyssey, he is preoccupied by three burning questions. First, how do these men do it? A Japanese eater, Takeru Kobayashi, can eat 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes, yet he’s a slip of a thing. Where does all that meat go? Second, why do they do it? Why do they risk their health for ... well, the privilege of appearing on ESPN and getting to wear a silly crown that announces to the world just how much shoofly pie they’ve managed to consume? (Shoofly pie is an Amish delicacy; it’s coffee cake with a gooey molasses bottom, and a handy shortcut to type two diabetes). And third, what does this sport and its growing popularity, tell us about the US?