The Lazy Scholar

BOOKENDS: Competitive Eating, Newsday, May 7, 2006

HORSEMEN OF THE ESOPHAGUS: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream, by Jason Fagone. Crown, 303 pp., $24.
EAT THIS BOOK: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit, by Ryan Nerz. St. Martin’s, 308 pp., $14.95 paper.

Eating contests in the last five years alone have inspired the rapid ingestion of asparagus, matzo balls, buffalo wings, crawfish, tiramisu and mayonnaise, just to offer a taste. But it’s turducken – chicken stuffed into a duck stuffed into a turkey and, at last, a hungry human mouth – that best epitomizes the brazen, ingenious excess of competitive eating. The frankenfowl made its contest debut in Manhattan the day before Thanksgiving 2003, as a promotional stunt for Turducken.com. It was the natural evolution of the dinner described by Charles Dickens in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” where a diverse crew of New Yorkers devour in minutes a mountain of poultry, “a turkey at the top, a pair of ducks at the bottom, and two fowls in the middle.” Americans have always had big eyes, big stomachs and quick forks, but only now are there men and women with the skill and determination to turn that appetite into a nationally recognized pastime, if not an Olympic event.

To navigate this spectacle, dubbed by some the country’s fastest growing sport, comes two appropriately rival accounts of a year on the circuit trailing contestants with names like Coondog O’Karma, Cookie Jarvis and Don “Moses” Lerman. First to the plate: “Eat This Book,” an infuriatingly shallow love letter from Ryan Nerz, an occasional announcer for the International Federation of Competitive Eating, the major organizer and promoter of gustatory battles in the United States, Nathan’s annual hot dog championship foremost among them. Nearly every chapter of Nerz’s dutiful but prosaic report reads like a local gee-whiz news profile; he laboriously grills competitor after competitor about methods – veggies to expand the stomach? water to weaken the gag reflex? – without ever wondering whether their feats have any meaning, psychological or social, beyond fun and fame.

They’re the same stock motives – “the fun of it,” “15 minutes of fame” – Jason Fagone tires of hearing in “Horsemen of the Esophagus,” a sly and vivid debunking, with liberal quotes from Kafka, E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo. Fagone owes his title to IFOCE founder George Shea, a Columbia lit-major-turned-publicist who hosts eating competitions with the grandiosity of a religious revival, his “tongue two-thirds in cheek.” The dilemma Fagone discovers: many feasters don’t get, or have no use for, Shea’s deadpan. What started as a P.R. engine with an edge of satire – of sports, its journalists and its fans – has become for many a serious pursuit, even if the exact significance eludes them.

The closest Fagone comes to uncovering this meaning resides in the immigrant origins alluded to in the “Big Fat American Dream” of his subtitle. Dickens wasn’t the first or last to smell the promise (and perils) of New World abundance – just look at the success of slim Sonya Thomas, raised poor in South Korea, now the Black Widow, with records in baked beans, hamburgers, lobsters and, yes, turducken, to name a few.

But Dickens had more to say about that New York dinner, poultry aside: “Everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast time to- morrow morning.” Competitive eating is not a simple emblem of abundance, or overconsumption, as some critics suggest. More perversely, it’s a fantasy of plenty disguising a deeper insecurity about one’s place in the food chain. Even as doc- tors and day traders join the battle, many of its finest fighters have humbler origins. Sonya

Thomas? A Burger King manager. Eric “Badlands” Booker, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority conductor. And Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, a truck driver who carts scraps from construction sites. Simmons and two others tell Fagone, “I screwed up my life,” and it’s for their sake Fagone feels compelled to find a “less impoverished language,” a story that might secure their dignity, whether or not competitive eating is really the salve they seek. These folks aren’t stuffed – they’re starving.