As per the expression, if (unlikely event) happens, I’ll eat my shoe! Well, if has anyone ever lost that bet and done it? I tried a search and didn’t see anything.
I don’t know about a shoe, but if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records a guy named “Mr. Mangetout” has eaten, among other things, a bicycle and an airplane. IIRC, he ground them up before ingesting them. A guy like that probably eats shoes like you eat french fries.
I’ve never heard of “I’ll eat my shoe”.
“I’ll eat my hat”, yes. Which I could do, being the owner of a straw hat.
CNN’s Tucker Carlson said he’d eat his shoe if Hillary Clinton’s book sold a million copies. But it looks like he didn’t go through with it:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/07/09/tucker.shoe/
You boil leather long enough and it becomes a gelatinous mass.
Film director Werner Herzog made a bet with his friend, documentary maker Errol Morris, that if Morris ever completed his first project, Gates of Heaven, about a pet cemetery, Herzog would eat his shoe. But Morris did complete it, and Herzog boiled (and boiled and boiled and boiled) a leather shoe and then ate it. Les Blank filmed it as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
I used to live in San Francisco and Mangetout was very popular due to his eating experience and location was like 20 miles away from us, even though it was a secret when he did these stunts. Jeff Havaraugh in Berkely, an aspiring med student in miochemical engineering tried to eat a green converse hightop in 2000. He did the whole boiling thing, even though it wasn’t leather. From what I hear he got sick and couldn’t finish. If it was leather, it was probably more possible, you never know. I got these facts from the 101 Pub on Market st. I remember all this because I thought I could do it…then I lost my motivation.
-M
For his movie The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin’s character ate a shoe. But I’ve heard that the shoe used was licorice, or something like it.
I read a book about the siege of Leningrad (as it was known then). The starving people ate a lot of stuff. Leather from shoes, belts, etc. was a food of next to last resort. (Last resort was stuff like sawdust, not counting, you know, “the other white meat.”)
You boil it a long time.
Let’s see…I’ve had to eat crow…had a shot at humble pie…have had egg on my face more times than I can remember…and have certainly had my foot in my mouth enough times. But never actually ate my shoe or my hat, nor heard of anyone else doing so.