The first time I entered an eating contest, I made a little girl cry. She was standing off to the side of the small deck attached to a Taco Joint in Dallas’s tony Lakewood neighborhood, and I was waving the wooden winner’s plaque over my head like an idiot, smears of beans and cheese caked across my face. This was back in 2013, and I’d just won the second annual Fourth of July “Big Kahuna” Taco Eating Contest, at which a handful of us had stood in the midday sun and eaten as many bean-and-cheese tacos as possible in eight minutes. As my friends screamed and laughed, the guy who’d come in second—the defending champ and middle-aged dad who looked more like he’d stepped off a yacht than out from behind a plate of half-eaten soft tacos—walked over to his daughter and patted her on the shoulder. She clung to his leg, koalalike, her piercing sobs echoing against the surrounding concrete facade. “It’s all right,” the man said to his daughter. “It’s gonna be okay.”
The front of my shirt was soaked from the water I’d been shoving the tacos into for lubrication, and it clung to my chest and distended belly as I staggered off the porch with little more than the plaque and an internal swirling of “Don’t puke. Just keep it down.”
I was in my twenties then. Still wasting my life away between days of menial work and nights of overdrinking, and I can imagine how grotesque I must have looked, how sloppy and wobbly and frantic I must have seemed as I pushed eleven or so lukewarm tacos down my throat. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve frequently wondered about that little girl, wondered if that was the first time she’d seen her father overwhelmed and beaten—a moment that generally comes to pass for all of us—or if it was her first sight of something more troubling: the lengths the teed up, hell-bent, and incredibly maladjusted among us will go in order to have our presence felt by the world.
My friend pulled his car into the 7-Eleven parking lot, and as he went inside to buy beer, I promptly leaned out the back passenger door and puked. I felt euphoric and terrible and obliterated in a way that was all too familiar.
In a country like ours, it should come as no surprise that we celebrate our freedom through excessive ingestion, and this is especially true on the Fourth of July, ever since the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest became a mainstream event. Joey Chestnut, the former rock star of this annual feast, is the Bill Russell or Yogi Berra of Major League Eating, the governing body that oversees roughly seventy professional eating competitions during any given year. (This Fourth of July, after being banned from competing in Nathan’s, he will participate in a hot dog–eating contest in El Paso.) Having won sixteen of the last seventeen Nathan’s titles, Chestnut consumes, on average, about 66 and a half hot dogs in ten minutes, buns and all. But I never aspired to be Chestnut.
At the time, the “amateur” world of competitive eating—encompassing small holiday events and local restaurant challenges—looked like a way to recapture a sporting life I’d lost, a means of once again reliving the fast-twitch tension of a stolen base, the chest-clattering thunder of a hardwood shuttle run. But food competitions didn’t help wrest back control. If anything, competitive eating became just another way to fold in on myself like a piece of dough, to reframe the consumptive appetites that led to fights, a DWI, and stints of flunking out of college. I was no good to anybody during this episodic decade and a half, but with its trophies and cheering crowds, competitive eating appeared on the horizon like a totem to noble excess, an opportunity to offer up my worst impulses as a virtue-seeking endeavor.
My first introduction to this loosely defined “sport” came in 2008, with the premiere of the Travel Channel’s Man v. Food. Having just graduated college (to everyone’s surprise), and living in my father’s apartment in Dallas, I watched as Adam Richman sat at the Big Texan in Amarillo and dug into its 72-ounce steak challenge, which includes a buttered roll, a baked potato, a side salad, and a shrimp cocktail. Richman knife-and-forked his way to victory, finishing the sixty-minute challenge in just under thirty minutes. I was dumbfounded. I’d spent five years flailing around in college, trying desperately to look appealing to possible employers, and now I spent my nights endlessly scrolling through the internet job mill, finding nothing but internships and unsalaried sales gigs. But here was a man who had figured it out.
“Christ,” I said. “I could do that!”
My father, eyes locked on the television, pretended not to hear me.
This was the precipice of food TV’s heyday, when chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay were evolving into international celebrities and cooking shows had gone from niche PBS filler to prime-time fare. Suddenly people I knew were calling themselves foodies, planning trips specifically to eat at Michelin-starred restaurants, and debating the efficacy of mignonette sauce on things called Blue Points and Wellfleets—whatever the hell those were.
I had grown up on canned food, the kind of peas and green beans that basically disintegrate when you bite into them, and the closest I ever got to a home-cooked meal was my father’s valiant attempt at baked salmon, a smell I still recoil at today. On my mother’s side, we were hyperreligious, the type of churchgoing stalwarts who deny pleasure as a means of penitence. Even though we liked to eat and drink, we denied these feelings and hid them in shame. My mother was the most accomplished at this. The energetic, two-jobbed divorcée could subsist on almost nothing at all, then revel in a banquet of booze, cigarettes, and chili cheese Fritos. Somewhere along the line, I learned this lesson as well: how a person could temporarily stop listening to their body and its pangs of need. I could go days and barely eat, then summon the strength to throw my bones against a wall for a coach’s approval. If I was at a party and people started chanting, “Drink! Drink! Drink!,” I could open my throat and vanish from existence. I was that annoying acolyte of Rudy and Cool Hand Luke, and I knew that pushing limits could curry favor. But at some point, that hard-nosed, scrappy outlook devolved into extremes of binging and purging. And by the end, my body became nothing more than a tool for consuming.
A year after my taco triumph, I set out to win the Brass Knuckle Corndog Beatdown, a contest held by the Libertine Bar, in Dallas, that sees how many corn dogs a person can polish off in fifteen minutes. I knew this would be the Super Bowl of my eating career. Not only had a future star of Major League Eating—Alex “Moose” Perez—finished third here, but as a kid, I’d salivated every September daydreaming of that first bite of a Fletcher’s corny dog at the state fair. This seemed like a true test of my eating mettle. Who cared how many licks it took to get to the center of a wretched Tootsie Pop? I was going to see how many corn dogs I could crush before they made me sick, and I’d get the pleasure for free.
As the bell rang, I rolled my first corn dog in mustard and took it down in three bites, nearly swallowing the stick. I tried to savor the next two, but as I briefly looked up, I saw all the people screaming, packed into this tiny space like tinned herring, and suddenly I seethed with energy. I stood upright, unsheathed stick after stick, and began shoving one fistful in water as I crammed the other against my face. I mashed the corn dogs up and forced them down, bite after gasping bite, my hands working furiously like a castaway juggler.
With each gnash of my molars, all I could think about was how full I was getting, how the table beneath me was soaked with bits of batter, the corn dogs’ wooden shafts starting to look like a wild game of pick-up sticks. I seemed to be outpacing everyone except the guy to my left, who, I noticed, had stood up as well. I chewed and time slowed, and I had the sinking realization that fifteen minutes was longer than I’d ever tried to speed-eat, and the pain in the upper reaches of my stomach started to boil over. The mouthfuls of thick batter compacting into softball-size bites simply wouldn’t go down. At a certain point I heaved slightly, a recoiling belch that forced me to reswallow something that had already started to digest. I locked eyes with an attractive young woman in the crowed, her face painted red, white, and blue for the occasion, but the paint had started to smear from the heat, and her nauseating grimace brought to mind a horrid Francis Bacon I’d seen.
The crowd started chanting:
“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . .”
It feels like a lifetime ago, but I placed second in the Brass Knuckle Corndog Beatdown, and I ate something like seventeen corn dogs, a mere pittance compared to what the pros could do. And I could have kept going—not that day, specifically, but for years afterward. Every six months or so, I could have crammed a wheelbarrow’s worth of calories into my digestive tract, walking away with rinky-dink trophies and gift cards, but I couldn’t stand the life I was living. When I reflect on the six food competitions I took part in—many of which I lost or barfed through—all I can think about is how willing I was to play the court jester.
Since then, through fits and starts, I’ve turned my life around. And that’s been far harder than any eating contest I ever entered. It has required emotional growth, an honest accounting of my relationships with food and alcohol, and a reengaging of a body that I’d long turned my back on. I joined a rugby team, competed in triathlons, started learning the finer points of squash. I’m past my physical prime, so there’s a low likelihood that I’ll ever “win” again in any conventional sporting sense, but that’s how it goes. And that’s okay.
I wanted consumption to lead to contentment, but like so many things, food and alcohol can quickly outlive their purposes, then cling to our histories in unwashable ways. But occasionally, if we’re patient and lucky, those stains can signify pleasure: grilled mint trout just outside Taos with my father; broiled steaks in the Mississippi Delta with my uncle and his cousin; and fresh oysters—yes, oysters—in Maine with my partner. I’m certainly not the first person to set their fork down, the flavors still present, and realize they’re full. It simply takes some of us a bit longer, and hopefully we all get to a point where we’re willing to nod, push ourselves back from the table, and say, “That was good. But I’ve had enough.”
