Gluttony as entertainment is nothing but gross
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Posted By By Catherine Ford Troy Media
Posted 1 month ago
Extreme eating contests are the latest and lowest form of reality television, a vulgar celebration of everything obsessive, indulgent and gross.
Worse than gross, they're immoral. When more than one billion of the world's population don't have enough to eat, gluttony as entertainment violates basic ethical human behaviour. It's also disgusting. For the religious among us, gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins.
But never underestimate the public's appetite for bread and circuses, especially in the summer when television's usually banal offerings achieve a new low.
ESPN, the American sports channel, broadcasts extreme eating events, including the popular July 4 hot-dog eating competition at Coney Island, which is actually a peninsula of New York City, turned into a summer playground after the American Civil War, and slowly left to decline from its heyday in the early 1900s.
If history is our guide, there's nothing surprising about extreme eating contests. Rock, paper, scissors is now considered a sport, along with the age-old annual pancake races in England and wife-carrying in Finland.
But North America has taken the simple act of eating and super-sized it. What started as a fun competition for ordinary folks at county fairs – something along the lines of a cow-milking contest or a tractor pull – has evolved into a professional league of public gluttons.
Since 1916, Coney Island's iconic hot-dog stand, Nathan's Famous, has sponsored the annual competition hot-dog eating orgy. This year, Joey Chestnut ate 54 hot dogs including buns in 10 minutes and claimed the $10,000 first prize. (It wasn't a record, which stands at 68 and is also held by Chestnut.) At this month's competition, the previous six-time champion, Takeru Kobayashi, was forcibly detained when he stormed the stage. He had been banned from the contest for refusing to sign a contract with Major League Eating. The "league" fancies itself along the lines of the NHL or the NFL — a professional body representing competitive athletes. In this case, professional eaters. And just like hockey and football players, you play only when you sign the contract. They say fact is stranger than fiction. Comparing professional eaters to professional athletes is a sickening insult to all professional athletes who have dedicated a significant portion of their lives to perfecting their skill.
Professional eaters will consume anything that qualifies as food: butter, mayonnaise, pancakes, pies, hamburgers, you name it. Put it on a plate, and they'll stuff their faces with it. One five-minute contest saw seven quarter-pound sticks of salted butter consumed, or about six weeks worth of the recommended daily amount of butter.
Offensive is the public display of bad manners. Margaret Visser, in her 1991 book The Rituals of Dinner, asserts that what separates us from the other animals is both table manners and controlling how much and what we eat. She writes: "Nowadays, 'fast food' is a phrase that has become so common that a good deal of the disapproval it used to express has disappeared. . . . But the bodily proprieties observed while eating — no dribbles and smears, no loud chewing, no grabbing, staring, crumbling, slurping — are part of the socially enforced formalities of behaviour while consuming fast food, as they are for dining in any context."
Bad enough we are a nation of public eaters, slurping, chewing and slobbering on the sidewalk, on public transit and gormlessly wandering about malls. Little wonder stores post notices forbidding food and drink.
I now confess: I was the first-place winner in one of these contests about 25 years ago when the guy I was dating was too cheap to buy me dinner. Instead, he signed me up for an oyster-eating competition. I went willingly, having a craving for bivalves. It was me in a face-off with four burly men. When the bell rang, something snapped in my brain and released the competitive thirst, so to speak. Two minutes later, I came up for air, having slurped my way through two dozen oysters. I said two words: "Water. Scotch."
I still have the rosette ribbon that was pinned to my pink dress. And I still love oysters.
Catherine Ford is a Troy Media columnist.
editor@cpheraldleader.com
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