The world is running out of heroes, but maybe it’s still too early to count the human race out.
In New York there lives a man whose recent accomplishment shows that there isn’t much we can’t achieve if we put our mind, and in this case, our mouth into it. This week Joey Chestnut became the world’s hot-dog eating champion, knocking off six-time title holder Takeru Kobayashi and my hat is off to him. Chestnut, competing in the annual Fourth of July competition, broke his own world record by inhaling 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes – a staggering one every 10.9 seconds – before a screaming crowd in Coney Island.
“If I needed to eat another one right now, I could,” the 23-year-old Californian said after receiving the mustard yellow belt emblematic of hot-dog eating supremacy, stated a Canadian Press story. Kobayashi, the Japanese eating machine, stayed with Chestnut frank-for-frank until the very end of the competition. He finished with 63 HDBs – hot dogs and buns – eaten in his best performance ever.
Almost as good as the event was the newspaper story describing it: “The two gustatory gladiators quickly distanced themselves from the rest of the 17 competitors, processing more beef than a slaughterhouse within the first few minutes. The two had each downed 60 hot dogs with 60 seconds to go when Chestnut, the veins on his forehead extended, put away the final franks to end Kobayashi’s reign.”
You know, we all come to our rightful place in life after a while and Joey Chestnut, obviously, has found his mission as a speedy consumer of tube steaks. There are worse fates.
And there are worse foods to be ingested in a hurry. The record for eating live cockroaches, for example, is held by Ken Edwards of Derbyshire, England. In 2001 he ate 36 hissing Madagascar roaches in one minute. Chris Hendrix holds the world record for eating crawfish. He ate 331 of them in 12 minutes. Richard LeFevre holds the world record for eating SPAM by eating six pounds in 12 minutes. Sonya Thomas ate 38 lobsters in 12 minutes. She also holds the record for hard boiled eggs, and pork and beans (8.4 pounds in 2 minutes 47 seconds) and many others. She weighs only 105 pounds. The world eating competition for cow brains is held by our hungry friend up top, Takeru Kobayashi, who swallowed 17.7 pounds in 15 minutes.
The world record for butter eating is seven quarter-pound sticks of salted butter in five minutes by Donald Lerman. The world record for eating cabbage is held by Charles Hardy. He ate six pounds, nine ounces in nine minutes. The world record for eating corn on the cob is 33.5 ears in 12 minutes, held by Cookie Jarvis. The world record for eating mayonnaise is held by Oleg Zhornitskiy. He ate four 32-ounce bowls in eight minutes.
I can happily live out the rest of my life taking a pass on seeing how fast I can gobble up cockroaches and cows’ brains, but to further the development of homo sapiens as a species, there is a record involving one particular sandwich for which I would be willing to compete. And that is the grilled cheese, a few of which I’ve put away in my life, especially in my bachelor years. There are annual contests in the U.S. with prizes nearing $30,000. The current world record belongs to Sonya Thomas (the mini-me mentioned above), who devoured 25 grilled cheese sandwiches in 10 minutes in a contest in 2005.
Stand back. I’m sure I can do better than that. Without even trying.
©2007 Jim Hagarty
