The first question is never really answered, though the gurgitators do reveal many of their lavatory habits (models can’t touch them when it comes to laxative abuse). Ditto the second.
Because not even they know what drives them. “I’m basically putting 11,000 calories into my body with the chance I could get hurt,” says Ed “Cookie” Jarvis. “What for? There’s gotta be a cause.” As for the third, Fagone grows too fond of his chomping, chewing, chowing mates; not admiring exactly, but painfully aware of their outsize (they are mostly outsize) humanity. So he shies away from a proper analysis of what it all means; that might involve disgust, and he doesn’t want to upset anyone. Instead, he makes do with pointing out that America is neither the first, nor the only, country to indulge in such spectacles of gorging (they date back to the Norse myths) — and with quoting Ralph Nader, the presidential candidate who, in 2003, named competitive eating as a major sign of “societal decay.” Fagone’s failure of distance renders his book a curiously bloated affair.
Like his new friends on the eating circuit, the author doggedly consumes an awful lot of rubbish — and then emits this great, big windy burp.
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