Professional Competitive Eaters = Mockable**

Did I tell you about the time I ate 15 burritos in 8 minutes?

I was hanging out with a friend the other day and the conversation turned to speculation over why everyone hates Americans.

“I don’t get it,” he said.  “I’m never critical of anyone’s beliefs like those Muslim extremists and Karl Rove.  I’ve never forced nasty cheese on an unsuspecting society and then called them uncultured pussies when they said that it tasted like another man’s feet.  I don’t even call it Canadian bacon anymore…I order ‘ham’ on my pizza.  What’s it going to take before Americans are accepted by the world?”

I continue to have but one answer for him.  Americans will only be accepted as fellow human beings instead of big-fat-know-it-all-jackasses when they take off their Yankee caps and then systematically disassemble the International Federation of Competitive Eating.  And before you point out the “International” part of their name to me – they are headquartered in New York and all of their “pros” except Takeru Kobayashi are from the states…even a guy who calls himself  “El Toro Jimenez”…so shut up.  They’re “international” the way Major League Baseball plays a “world series”.

I mean, I don’t want to be the politically correct police here, but I think that fact that men and women in this country routinely sit down and race to consume pounds of food that’s so rich it would literally kill your average Darfurian, while crowds cheer them on and cameras commemorate the event, either literally is or at least symbolizes the reason everyone hates us so much.

They didn’t hate us when we actually believed we could maintain our standard of living as we produced nothing and had all of our stuff shipped in from Malaysian sweatshops.  They didn’t  even hate us when we took money from the Chinese and gambled it on credit default swaps. Hell, they didn’t even hate us when we allowed Madonna to adopt a weird Europeanesque accent and go from country to country, buying up their spare babies.

I maintain that the world didn’t hate us until they read Joey Chestnut’s bio from the International Federation of Competitive Eating website: “Joey rose to lofty heights in record time, from winning Rookie of the Year for 2005 to defeating the great Kobayashi in the 2007 and 2008 Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contests and the 2008 Krystal Square Off V World Hamburger Eating Championship. His career consists of the 2005-2008 seasons, in which he won the asparagus title four times, set an astonishing new world record of 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes, five times beat Kobayashi, four times won the Chinook Winds rib-eating championship, dominated nearly every chicken wing competition he attempted, and most recently did the unthinkable by eating 103 Krystal hamburgers in only 8 minutes. Joey Chestnut is truly an American hero and a national treasure.”

AN AMERICAN HERO AND NATIONAL TREASURE? ROOKIE OF THE YEAR?  ASPARAGUS?  I promise, I am not going after the easy joke here…I am genuinely grossed out – Can you imagine what your pee would smell like after eating 8.8 pounds of asparagus?

Seriously, go over there and look at the “records” page.  Somebody ate 7 quarter-pound sticks of salted butter in 5 minutes.  Butter!  I am dry heaving as I think about it.  Almost every page of their entire site is mockable.  A couple of my personal favorites are “…do not try speed eating at home” and “polling results that show Alaska Governor Sarah Palin overwhelming Senator Joe Biden in a hypothetical hamburger-eating match-up”.  Oh God I can’t take it anymore.  I’m going to go watch the Travel Channel.  I hope that fat idiot that travels around the country eating too much is on…

**In the interest of full disclosure, the author is a fat guy.  However, he prefers to do his binge eating in the privacy of his basement…between the sobbing and tears…