I accidentally caught part of one of those Fox competitive eating specials and heard one of the announcers describe a competitor as “an athlete at the top of his game.” From the outside looking, that’s one odd sport.
There are all kinds of quirky competition circuits outside of professional sports… from the dangerous, like parkour; to the illegal, like bumfights and underground dog fighting arenas; to the bemusing, like dog shows, whistling contests, kiddie beauty pagaents, monster truck rallys and tractor pulls, fighting robots and my favorite, the periodic bids to be included in Guinness. Eating contests are just another variation in a long list of contests where there’s an odd amount of money and prestige on the line to prove someone’s best at something.
I once read a book on the history of Christmas and back around 1900 in NYC there was an annual Christmas dinner for the poor. Sounds nice but, this was held in Madison Square Garden, the original one. And the dinner was paid for by tickets sold so the well-to-do would buy tickets and watch the poor have dinner served and they gained great amusements at their lack of table manners or when one the poor may try to secretly stick some food in their pocket.
What’s the name of that book, Zebra? Sounds interesting.
Yes Buffalo really has an annual chicken wing festival. I first heard of Sonya Thomas when she won the who can eat the most contest last year or the year before.
Very odd to me.
From the Wikipedia entry for Sonya Thomas:
No duh!
It was very interesting.
I could go for 26 grilled cheese sandwiches right now! Of course, I’d get full 3/4 of the way through the first one and then feel guilty about wasting the other 25.
That was what I found weird about it too. Of course, I find the whole sports-enthusiast thing to be a bit odd too. I dislike team sports, and if I were interested enough in something to watch it on TV, I’d most likely rather be out there doing it instead of just watching it.
I’m reminded of this pit thread, for some reason.
Imagine switching on the evening news in your clay hut in Niger, and seeing an item about some American woman who downs 26 grilled cheese sandwiches, for fun. Not that you’d have a TV, of course.
My father knew a priest when he was young. The priest, upon returning from missionary work in Africa for 15 years, witnessed a TV commercial for cat food. This must have been in the early 60’s. He ran outside, to vomit. The mere thought that we treat our animals better than some people in the world, made him physically sick.
I have a similar, if less violent, reaction to “competitive eating”.
Right, because this is so much less productive and more resource consuming than, say, F1 racing. At least competive eaters aren’t spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year to drive around ia fake road and not get anywhere. Just think of all the needed medicine Ferrari’s budget for 2006 would buy for Africa?
I mean, I think that competive eating is pretty gross, but c’mon. This isn’t exactly a logically consistent argument against it. And I LOVE auto racing.
Heh. 
Strictly rationally speaking, you do have a point. Any money spent on F1 would be better spent feeding the poor and hungy of the world. Then again, the same would apply to any other sport. Or arts, for that matter. I think the Gugenheimer should sell its ridculous stack of silly drawings, and wire the proceeds to Ethiopia!
No, of course not. Whether you throw an expensive sport like F1 or whatever other passtime into the mix, the argument remains weak as these are established sports.
My main beefs (I kill me) with competitive eating are that is is really “in your face”, so to speak. Stuffing yourself to the point of vomiting, for fun? For “sport”?
The second beef would be, in light of your remark, that “competitive eating” doesn’t seem to have a wide backing or history, which other money-wasting activities (say, F1 ;)) do have.
So, yeah. It’s possible to rationalise competitive eating, but I still think it’s disgusting.
Right.
I’m sure there’s plenty of other, more important and effective, ways that wealthy societies can be less wasteful and more sharing. But competitive over-consumption is just morally repulsive. It really is rubbing it in. You’d be as well waving those sandwiches in front of a few starving orphans first, just to to add extra spice to the proceedings.
And the fact that over-consumption is now a very real and significant health problem in western countries gives the whole thing a nasty whiff of irony. Look everyone! We’re killing ourselves with the very thing that would save lives elesewhere! And we’re doing it for fun!