Conspicuous Consumption

I was supposed to be on a diet. But I’ve always had a weak
spot for eating contests. When I learned that The Stranger was
going to sponsor a spring-roll-eating contest to raise money for the
Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development
Authority, and that we needed a staffer to compete, I was tempted. When
I heard the competitors would include two-time Republican gubernatorial
candidate Dino Rossi, I had to do it. Rossi is just the kind of smug macho GOP
jus’ folks millionaire fucker who makes my blood boil. I might
not be able to do much, but I do know I can eat. So I was in.

It turned out to be one of the weirdest lineups of local
“celebrities” imaginable. In addition to Rossi, competitors included
King County Council member (and King County Executive candidate) Dow
Constantine; James Sun, a former contestant from the TV show The
Apprentice; Toby Crittenden, who does outreach for Washington Bus,
an organization devoted to getting young people involved in politics;
and former Seattle Seahawk and current sports-radio host Brock Huard.
The contest would be two minutes long, the spring rolls would be
vegetarian and deep-fried, and Geo from Blue Scholars would host.
Because of the sheer gonzo fucknuttedness of the situation, I couldn’t
tell my friends about the competition without breaking into a giggle.
It was weird, yes, but I was also thrilled: Eating competitively has
always been a dream of mine, and that dream was about to come true.

W hen I was in my early 20s, living in Boston, and bored, and
all my friends were young, bored men in their early 20s, four of us
decided to go to the Old Country Buffet in Medford, Massachusetts. It
was a kind of challenge between us, a joke: Try to get the most out of
an all-you-can-eat restaurant by eating as much meat as possible. All I
can really remember of the restaurant is that it was mostly brown, with
a golden cast to the light. With the ratty institutional carpet and the
enormous lonely men sitting alone in booths, the place reeked of a sad
kind of desire. It was just the kind of desperate scene that young men
love to flirt with, to see how close they can get to it without getting
any of that desperate stench permanently on them.

By chance, we arrived on chicken-fried steak night, and so while my
three friends branched out into the other meats, I ate three gigantic
plates of these puck-shaped, uniformly tan steak patties, covered with
clumpy white sauce. We were ironic in our consumption, but we were also
young men, and so we were egging each other into eating as much as we
possibly could—”Boy, I’m still hungry! This meat loaf must be
made out of air!”—and as one of my friends went up for a fourth
time, I pushed another plate of steaks down my gullet. And then we ate
dessert. I had the soft-serve, and there was a watery chocolate pudding
and cakes that seemed to be constructed from half-chewed cereal.
Finally, the walls were closing in on us, and we could genuinely eat no
more, and so we left the Old Country Buffet to begin the walk back to
public transit.

We stood in front of the Meadow Glen Mall, looking out over the
parking lot at the dusk—it was one of the first comfortable
spring nights of the year, when you could leave the house without a
parka. Nearby, a woman scolded her husband. She was too tired to walk
to the car, and so she would stand at the mall entrance with her
stroller and wait for him to bring the car around. My friends and I
stood there, grinning, and then I said: “I can’t
believe how much
we just ate.” We all started laughing, like it was the funniest joke
we’d ever heard. We laughed at each other’s laughing, at how each
others’ distended bellies shook with the laughter, and we laughed at
how tears leaked from our own eyes while our bellies shook. And the
laughter got more and more raucous. And then it happened. One of us,
Spencer, leaned over into a trash can and vomited. That was, of course,
the funniest thing in the world, and we laughed harder, and that
finally broke me, and I leaned over and vomited into the trash can. The
woman grabbed her stroller and ran away from us. That was the funniest
thing of all.

We realized that security might show up, and so we kind of
stagger-ran around to the back of the mall, where the big trucks go to
unload their merchandise, laughing and horking all the while, except
for Dick, who prided himself on being tough. He tried to tell us how
disgusting it all was, but once this sort of thing starts, it’s
impossible to stop. We must’ve gone for 20 minutes, taking turns,
heaving our buffet back out onto the pavement and laughing at it.

Here’s the thing: When you fill your stomach to bursting and then
immediately empty it, the feeling is rather pleasant. It feels like the
calm after a particularly tough bout of strenuous exercise, like the
orgasmic rush of taking too many Percocets at once. Everything seemed
to have a colorful aura around it. Everything glowed and hummed and
felt hazy and sharp at once. My face hurt from laughing so hard.
Finally, Dick couldn’t take it anymore; he ran away from us and dove
into a nearby shrub. We laughed at him, even as he disappeared. A
minute or two later, he emerged from the bushes, wobbly, wiping his
face. Just as we got control of our laughter, he looked right at us and
said, “I just puked pure puddin’.” We all laughed more, and then we
went into the mall and walked around, touching things and staring way
too long at textures and mirrors.

T ake one look at me, and you can tell that I’ve never been
fond of physical exertion; I can’t seem to ever take any pleasure in
exercise. Long, rambling walks are the only kind of physical activity I
enjoy. But stupid stunts are oxygen to a young man’s mind, and after
the Old Country Buffet incident, I frequently competed in eating
contests with roommates. Possibly because my friends are smarter than I
am, I won all of those contests. Years later, in 2002, I won an amateur
no-hands pie-eating contest—two and a half cherry pies in two
minutes—at a neighborhood festival in Pioneer Square. There is
something incredibly satisfying about shoving your face directly into
the center of a big mound of food. And there’s something even more
rewarding about eating your way to air. Because I had pie in my eyes, I
couldn’t see my competitors and didn’t know how they were doing. But
when the whistle blew, I had beaten my closest competitor by an entire
pie. I have good instincts for it, clearly, but I wanted to take the
spring-roll competition seriously, so I started doing research into the
competitive-eating field. If you live in Seattle and you’re interested
in competitive eating, there’s one man you have to talk to.

Erik “The Red” Denmark is the world-record holder in competitive
spot-shrimp eating. He consumed nearly five pounds worth of the animal
(fact: the largest shrimp in Puget Sound) in 12 minutes and competes in
eating contests around the country. He’ll tackle any type of food (9.75
Native American fry breads in 8 minutes, 6 pounds of king salmon in 8
minutes, 4.7 pounds of ribs in 12 minutes), but his specialty is hot
and spicy dishes. He’s known for his pepper eating (105
jalapeños in 8 minutes, 32 habanero peppers in 1 minute, both
with no water during the competition or for five minutes after) and
chicken wings (“I like ’em so covered with habeneros that they’re
black”). If you’re picturing an overweight man, you’re about a decade
behind. Obese men like Ed “Cookie” Jarvis and rapper/
eater Eric
“Badlands” Booker are no longer the standard in competitive eating.
When a skinny five-foot-eight man named Takeru Kobayashi won the
Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest in 2001 by eating 50 hot dogs in 12
minutes, doubling the previous record, the game changed forever. The
new breed of eaters are more often built like
Denmark—six-foot-four, lean, and athletic. It was Kobayashi who
inspired Denmark: “It made me wonder how many hot dogs I could
eat.”

Denmark is a member of the International Federation of Competitive
Eating (IFOCE), an organization founded by New York City publicists
George and Richard Shea. The Shea brothers, through sheer P. T.
Barnum–style hucksterism, have built the IFOCE into a brand and
transformed the wilderness of the eating contest from ragtag events
held at state fairs, those queasy celebrations of the community’s
bounty, into a regulated, televised industry. There are countless news
stories about competitive eaters. Jason Fagone, in his stellar book on
competitive eating and the IFOCE titled Horsemen of the
Esophagus, refers to the endless parade of “half-serious,
half-playful newspaper feature[s]” and “the puffy, sprawling alt-weekly
profile[s] of the alt-weekly town’s most prominent eater” that always
“fail to capture the mad galumphing experience of an eating
contest.”

Denmark and I are sitting in Phnom Penh Noodle House, the Cambodian
restaurant that will supply the spring rolls for the competition. He’s
ordered an extra-hot soup and has spiced up the bowl with about half of
every bottle on the table: The soup is an angry red, and it seems to
swirl of its own accord. As he eats, he’s continually sniffling and
wiping his nose on napkins, which sit in a huge mound to his left. He’s
surprisingly low-key—the field attracts enormous
personalities—and he’s very forthcoming with advice. He talks
about competitive eating as a kind of athleticism. “It sucks sometimes
because I have to think about everything I’m putting in my body.” (He
asked the waitress for fewer noodles in his soup, touching his belly
and explaining, “Don’t want too many carbs.”) Eating, Denmark says, is
“about knowing your body’s limits and pushing those limits.”

I ask him why there have been no
IFOCE-sponsored
spring-roll-eating contests. “They’re a fatty food, and those are
usually pretty tough. And they’re crunchy, too, so they’re kind of hard
to eat. And, probably, it’s a cultural thing. Most Chinese food places
wouldn’t think of an eating contest as a good advertisement for their
food.” We order three orders of spring rolls—they come six to an
order—and Denmark stares them down. “I don’t think dunking is
going to help you,” he says. Most eaters dunk their food in water or
some sort of juice in order to get the food as close to digested as
possible before they put it in their mouth. But the crunchy fried shell
is going to resist any short-term soaking. “You’ll need some sort of
liquid, just to wash it down.” Lemonade is a favorite on the circuit,
because it can mask the flavor (to avoid “flavor overload,” some eaters
will line their nostrils with VapoRub to cover the taste of the food
they’re consuming). I explain that they’ll provide a liter of water at
the contest. “Make sure it’s warmer than room temperature,” Denmark
says. “Cold water is refreshing, and it causes your throat to close for
a second when you swallow it. You’ll need to take a drink for every
piece you put in your mouth.” He demonstrates, holding a spring roll in
one hand and a glass of water in the other. “You can probably do them
two at a time. I think the winner of this contest is going to do 10
rolls in two minutes.”

He looks down at the spring rolls. “Are we gonna do this?” I need to
try speed-eating these rolls. There are 13 left. Demark offers to eat
eight to my four, with an extra bonus roll for the person who finishes
his first. My stomach is actually fluttering. I excuse myself, walk to
the bathroom, and try to breathe. I never get nervous in this kind of
dramatic, panic-attack fashion. I return and sit back down.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I say. “I feel like I’m gonna
hork.”

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” Denmark says. “So you
throw up in a restaurant.”

My heart is pounding. We order warm water, and Denmark sets up his
phone’s stopwatch. And then I take a breath—and we start.

I put one spring roll in my mouth and chew. It’s kind of tough;
Denmark was right. I drink a sip of water and it goes down easily. I
grab two and push them in with my left hand, then sip with my right
hand. It’s easy! I take the fourth, which goes down smoothly, and I
notice that Denmark still hasn’t grabbed the bonus roll, which I do
away with and we both finish at the same time. Five to eight, in 45
seconds. Denmark gives me a high five. “That was pretty good,” he says.
“I think you’ll be able to do 12.” My nausea went away the moment I
started eating, and, post-eating, I feel this strange glow, a feeling
of accomplishment. I kind of want to order three more trays and try to
beat Denmark. I ask him if this sort of rush is common. He explains
that after the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, he and the other eaters
will go to Hooter’s and order tray after tray of chicken wings and wash
them down with pitchers of beer. Usually after a competition with other
serious eaters, they’ll stay out until two or three in the morning,
pouring massive amounts of booze and food down their throats. “We kind
of egg each other on,” Denmark says.

When he started eating, Denmark would go to the store, buy seven or
eight cabbages, and then boil and eat them “not at competitive speed,
but, you know, pretty fast” to stretch his stomach. He drinks water
constantly to keep his stomach loose. He suggests chewing gum “three or
four sticks at a time, all the time” to work up my jaw strength for the
competition. (In an e-mail, another competitive eater,
Crazy Legs
Conti, suggests I eat frozen Tootsie Rolls, but Denmark demurs: “That
sounds like a good idea, but I’m diabetic, so it wouldn’t work for me.”
His type 1 diabetes is what drove him as a child from sweet foods to
spicy foods, presumably setting his whole eating life in motion. Before
he does the sweet contests, such as elephant ears, he has to “take a
lot of insulin.”) Because the spring-roll-eating contest is at 7:00
p.m. (“I hate night contests”), Denmark suggests that I eat a small
bowl of cereal that morning, drink water continually all day long, and
then don’t ingest anything at all for three hours before the
contest.

W hich is exactly what I do on April 29, the day of the
competition. Showbox Sodo is alive with dancers and performers, and the
air smells like fried food and perfume. Denmark has come out to watch
me compete. I make my way back to the greenroom and meet the other
competitors. It’s weird hanging around with them. People like Huard,
Rossi, and Constantine act like famous people, but they
really
could go just about anywhere outside of Washington State and nobody
would have a blessed clue who they were. But here, they’re celebrities.
They banter. Huard, a tall, blond action figure of a man, keeps joking
about how nervous he is, but in that sort of jock way that suggests
he’s being preemptively humble in the face of his impending victory.
Rossi, with the bland, crinkly looks of a past-his-prime TV newscaster,
joins Constantine in keeping an ironic distance and downplaying their
involvement by not taking it too seriously.

Eating contests are serious business, though: There are any number
of things that can go wrong. The biggest and most visible problem is
what the IFOCE refers to as a “reversal of fortune” or a “Roman
incident,” also known as vomiting, which will get you immediately
disqualified from any competition. But there are other issues,
including “the meat sweats,” which is an intense, odorous sweat that
plagues some eaters. If the temperature is too hot or too cold, that
can throw off your game and slow you down or cause cramps. Long-term,
you can suffer from type 2 diabetes or acid reflux. A couple of eaters
have suffered strokes while competing. The IFOCE heavily promotes
safety in all its events and on its website. When I contacted George
Shea by e-mail to ask if he had any advice, his only response was: “I
would urge you not to participate unless there is an emergency medical
technician on hand for safety. Good luck.”

Even if you’re functioning at champion levels, something is going on
in your system that shouldn’t be happening. An eater in Horsemen of
the Esophagus hints that the fastest eaters share a secret
to eating that goes beyond expanding one’s stomach. Competitive eaters
presumably use every inch of their digestive space by deluging their
colons and intestines to the point where they can no longer process the
food and instead release it in a flood. To be blunt, some eaters are
basically one false move away from shitting themselves.

But there’s no need for that tonight. Two minutes isn’t anywhere
near the marathon of a professional eating contest. It’s a sprint, pure
and simple. I stay quiet in the greenroom, jogging my leg up and down
and keeping focused on what I’m going to do.

And then I do it. After a little backstage banter, Geo introduces
all of us, one after another, and the contestants sit at a long table
in front of roasting pans filled with 25 spring rolls each. I’m second
to last, and there is a space for me at the table right next to Rossi.
I’ve been planning for this moment for two months. I come out screaming
like a pro wrestler: “There are no recounts this time, Dino Rossi! No
recounts!” My friends in the audience tell me that Rossi’s face soured
at the mention of his 2004 hairbreadth loss to Governor Christine
Gregoire, but I have already moved on. Denmark suggested that I eat
standing up, so I pick up my chair and drop-kick it away from the
table. Geo explains the rules: two minutes, or the first one to clean
their pan automatically wins.

The clock starts, and we all dig in. I take it just as Denmark
suggested: Two at a time, washed down with plenty of water.
Unexpectedly, I realize I’m dancing to the music—a remixed
version of Smash Mouth’s “All Star”—as I’m chowing down. This is
not unprecedented. The competitive-eating world was rocked when the
“Kobayashi shimmy” was introduced to the sport. The theory: Wiggling in
place helps food rush through the system faster. Around rolls 9 and 10,
I start to get a little too confident in my ability, and I overstuff my
mouth; I almost cough out some spring roll, simply because it’s too
much food for me to hold. Denmark makes eye contact with me, and I slow
down a bit.

When you are in the competitive-eating zone, there is a rhythm and
nothing else. The roar of the crowd and the announcer all sound like
they’re underwater. You’re aware of sensations singly (you’re aware of
the way grease spreads across your face as you jam food into it, or
you’re aware of the burnt-plastic smell of too much fried food directly
under your nose), but you can’t cohere them into one single experience.
All that you are is two hands and a mouth—and that mouth doesn’t
feel attached to anything, it’s the opening to a bottomless chasm. It
is perhaps as close to infancy as I have felt in my adult life.

Denmark notices that we’ve been eating for more than two minutes and
that Geo isn’t keeping time. He walks over and suggests that they start
the countdown, at what he estimates to be the two-and-a-half-minute
mark. As the countdown begins, I scan both sides of the table. I can’t
manage to count, but I can see that Huard, over on the side, has very
few spring rolls left in his tray.

I decide to chipmunk.

“Chipmunking” is a common practice in eating contests: As the event
draws to a close, you stuff as much food in your mouth as possible and
swallow it while the judges are doing the official tally, after the
buzzer sounds. Some contests allow it, some don’t. I grab a spring roll
and jam it in my mouth as the crowd shouts “one!” and it’s over.

My chipmunking was for naught. Constantine ate 6 spring rolls, Rossi
ate 8, Crittenden ate 12, Huard ate 21. And I ate 23.

On the video of the event—on The Stranger‘s
website—you can watch Huard’s face turn cold and nasty when he
realizes he’s not going to win. I think it’s the same face that
appeared under his football helmet when a game suddenly went south. He
looks like someone took something valuable from him. Huard might have
shaken my hand, I honestly don’t remember, but someone says “Brock is
pissed” as I walk over to claim my three-foot-tall golf trophy adorned
with spring rolls made out of felt. I eat my remaining two spring rolls
as a kind of end-zone spike, and I grab my trophy and shout at the
audience in my best Don King: “I am a force of nature! I am the eve of
destruction! I am Katrina with a wiener! I’m eating dinner at your
house! I’m eating dinner at your house!” I hear that Huard left the
building within five minutes of the contest ending. Rossi hangs around,
but he doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the evening. The other
contestants are sweet and polite, and they happily shake my greasy
hand.

When you’re holding a large trophy covered with felt spring rolls,
lots of people want to take pictures with you: the Verizon salesmen,
the event’s organizers, random women in the crowd, the man with the
giant papier-mâché baby head who’s part of the dancing
entertainment. And here’s the other thing with winning a
spring-roll-eating contest: Afterward, you feel nauseated. Really
nauseated. It’s like getting punched in the face. You don’t feel it
until the adrenaline is gone and the moment has passed. The nausea
spreads through me like a poison, and for a while, I can’t stand up
straight; I have to walk bent over like an old man. After a few
burps—burps that don’t taste like food so much as raw, tepid fry
grease—I can bear the pain again, and I pose for more pictures
and find myself unable to answer any of the very nice people who come
over to me and ask, “How did you do that?”

The next morning, I uncharacteristically wake up at 5:00 a.m. with a
strange, gluey feeling, like someone has filled my torso with wet
cement. Not an ache so much as a heaviness. But even worse is what’s
going on in my head. You know when you come home tipsy from the bar and
you eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s and you wake up in the
morning with that particular feeling of self-loathing? Imagine that,
except with 10 pints of Ben & Jerry’s. The voices in my head
are loud and clear: You stupid fat fuck. You stupid fucking fat
fuck. What the fuck did you do that for? Oh you fat fucking disgusting
piece of shit. I’ve developed a certain amount of Catholic guilt in
my life, but this was worse than almost any other attack of shame I’ve
ever felt. The voices chased me out of bed and followed me to work, two
hours early.

I halfway thought, when I started this competitive-eating track,
that I’d wind up wanting to pursue eating as a sport. But this is one
of the worst mornings of my life; I can’t imagine going through this
again. All I have to show for it is a hilarious trophy and conclusive
evidence that Brock Huard is a giant fucking pussy. In the 48 hours
since the competition, I haven’t eaten a thing, but I’m starting to
think about food again. People have asked me if I’m going to start my
diet back up, but I think a diet might be the wrong way to go. All my
life, I’ve been unable to find the right balance between eating too
much and eating too little. I think it might be time to finally grow
up. You know, just eat when I’m hungry, and stop eating when I’m
full.