The Jalapeno Eating World Championship at the Texas State Fair was last week. Richard LeFevre, a 62-year-old, won the title by swallowing 247 peppers in eight minutes.
On the other hand, seven million people received government assistance last week (and every week) from food banks across the nation.
But that doesn't deter people like LeFevre, the world's eighth-ranked eater. In addition to his new title, he also holds the world record for SPAM eating (6 pounds in 12 minutes) and watermelon (11.5 pounds in 15 minutes).
It is estimated that 96 billion pounds of food is thrown out by the food service industry every year, but according to the 2000 U.S. census, 10.5 million U.S. households were food insecure, meaning that at some point they didn't have enough food for an active
healthy life for all household members.
Sonya Thomas, the world's third-ranked eater, who weighs in at only 105 pounds, holds the record for eating lobster (11.3 pounds in 12 minutes), hard-boiled eggs (65 in 6 minutes, 40 seconds) and meatballs (10 pounds, 3 ounces in 12 minutes), among a wide variety of other mouth-stuffing records.
While the International Federation of Competitive Eating is hosting eating competitions across the country and world, a third of Americans on welfare reported that they usually run out of food by the end of the month and don't have the money to buy more.
The IFOCE, headquartered in New York, helps to ensure that the sport remains safe while also seeking to G? (create) an environment in which fans may enjoy the display of competitive eating skill.
I'm sorry, did they just call eating 53 hotdogs in less than 12 minutes a sport? (That record, by the way, is held by the 27-year-old Japanese man Takeru Kobayashi, the top-ranked eater in the world.)
Just because an activity airs on ESPN or hosts event such as the Glutton Bowl does not make it a sport in my book.
Just because the athletes train by expanding their stomachs and weight training to be capable of consuming 6,000 or more calories a day (three times the average recommended amount) does not mean they should be glorified in front of crowds of screaming fans.
And yet, for some reason they are.
Despite estimates that someone in the world dies every four seconds from starvation, competitive eating remains popular, especially in the United States where we tend to glorify consuming in excess and have the highest rate of obesity of any country.
The American glorification of competitive eating can be traced largely to the televised coverage of the Fourth of July hotdog-eating contest that has been a Coney Island standard since 1916.
Since that time, when the hotdog-eating record was a mere 13 dogs, Oleg Zhornitiskiy has secured the mayonnaise-eating record with four 32-ounce bowls in 8 minutes. Don Lerman has the butter-eating record with 7 quarter-pound sticks in 5 minutes, and Eric Booker took home first in doughnut-eating with 49 glazed doughnuts in 8 minutes.
If you think you have what it takes to compete (God forbid), it's terribly simple to sign up to participate in competitive eating. Just go to www.ifoce.com and fill in your name, e-mail, address, phone number and eating specialty.
Luckily it's just as easy to donate food to those who can't even feed their families, let alone dream of competing. Just stop by Nelson, Boyd or Shively market and either drop off non-perishables or spend your extra meals on food to donate in the store.
And the next time you have a bowl of ice cream, think of the headache Patrick Bertoletti must have had after he consumed 1.75 gallons in 8 minutes -
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Food distribution borders on insane
