Mildly Great Moments in Competitive Eating

An interesting proposition came across me the other day at work. Some company gave our company a solid brick of Hershey chocolate with their corporate logo on it as a Christmas, err I mean "Holiday" present. Anyways, this monstrosity has been sitting in the break room for about a month now because nobody in the office knows what the hell to do with it.

That is until one of the vice president’s threw down the challenge that he would give 50 bones to anyone who could eat the whole thing in under 2 hours. As an aspiring athlete in the sport of competitive eating, this immediate piqued my interest.

Even though I toil day to day as a real estate analyst, I know my true calling is to become a world champion eater of something. I still haven’t decided if I want to eat a lot of something the fastest or eat the largest quantity of something in a single sitting. All I know is that I want to be on the same pedestal as that little Asian kid that can eat 30 hot dogs in 5 minutes or whatever his crazy record is. People love that kid. I heard he can’t walk the streets of Asia without getting mobbed by fans. How sweet would that be?

My foray into competitive eating has been less than stellar up to this point. I’ve tried drinking a gallon of milk in one hour without throwing up but everyone knows that’s impossible. I’ve also eaten 2 slices of bread in a minute but that shit is BORING! Any hack can do that. It’s so amateurish.

My first real challenge was posed by a roommate after he heard my frozen pizza hypothesis. My frozen pizza theory is simply that 100% of all men have the capacity to eat an entire frozen pizza at any given time. I don’t care if the dude just got done stuffing himself at Thanksgiving, if presented a frozen pizza, the guy could somehow still eat the whole thing with little to no trouble. It’s just one of the many idiosyncrasies of the male appetite. I can’t explain it, it’s just true.

Anyways, my buddy challenged me to eat 4 frozen pizzas in 1 hour with the prize being the cost of the pizzas. It was an interesting proposal but I felt the stakes were too low to jeopardize my frozen pizza hypothesis. Can you imagine what the world would be like today if Einstein gambled away his theory of relativity because some other scientist bet him he couldn’t eat six Whoppers in one sitting or some stupid shit like that? Not on my watch.

Back to the mammoth brick of chocolate, I did some prep work to test the feasibility of the challenge. I weighed the chocolate on the postage meter minus the packaging and it came out to 2 lbs and 5 ounces. I then checked Hershey’s website for nutritional information, made some metric to English conversions, and deduced that the block had approximately 5170 calories and 685 grams of fat.

After about an hour of deliberation, I ultimately decided to back off from the challenge. I weighed the benefit of being the office hero for the rest of the afternoon versus having the runs for the next 8 weeks. It was THAT and the fact that I didn’t want to be the youngest person to ever need a triple bypass heart transplant. I think I chose wisely.

Maybe I’ll never be a grand master in the art of gorging myself, but I do have a back up plan in case things don’t pan out. I also happen to be extremely awesome at rock-paper-scissors. My rock strategy never fails…



Charles Lindbergh, Lou Gehring, Chuck Yaeger, Indiana Jones, and now Takeru Kobayashi: The short list of greatest American Heros grows ever longer.