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Dog Bites ManThe past and future of competitive eating injuries, from death by cheese to the dreaded ruptured stomach.

By Jason Fagone
Posted Tuesday, July 3, 2007, at 11:38 AM ET
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand.

On June 24, Japan's Takeru Kobayashi posted some troubling news on his blog: The greatest eater in the world could no longer open his mouth. The culprit? An arthritic jaw. Kobayashi, who has dominated every Fourth of July hot-dog-eating contest since 2001, later blamed the injury on wisdom teeth that had grown in crookedly, coupled with overly vigorous training. As the Google translation put it, "Long time strength training, becoming big stress in the jaw, it is to be accumulated." Sounds reasonable—and if Kobayashi's jaw had crapped out six months ago, few would have noticed. But this is hot dog season. When the champ implied that he might not compete in this Wednesday's big contest at Coney Island, the 29-year-old's refusenik mandible was the lead story on the New York Times' Web site. A few days later, he beat a quick retreat. "Thanks to everyone's support," he blogged, "I am able to aggressively pursue treatment for my condition. ... I look forward to facing my fellow competitors on July 4th!"

It's rare, to say the least, for a competitive-eating injury to rate coverage on CNN and ESPN. Eating-related maladies tend to be chuckled over by newscasters and DJs, who see eating contests as fodder for light human-interest stories, and exploited by op-ed jeremiahs, who see competitive eating as the apotheosis of a litany of American sins: gluttony, obesity, our love of dumb spectacles. Honestly, most eating injuries are pretty unsurprising, arising from health conditions you'd expect to find among the professionally hungry (obesity, diabetes) or from the poor choices of inexperienced eaters who get in over their heads. But Kobayashi's sore jaw deserves all the attention it's getting and more. It is something new to competitive eating: a true athletic injury. By introducing a tragic dimension to a phenomenon that has always gorged on irony and slapstick comedy, the man they call "Tsunami" is doing competitive eating a great and useful service.

You can't say the same for the eaters of yore. The annals of gurgitation are dotted with strokes and blocked windpipes, of guts literally busted. Go as far back as you like. The novel The Golden Ass, written around A.D. 200, tells of an ancient food fighter almost choking to death on a piece of cheese. The native Tlingit peoples of Alaska used to hold raucous eating contests at their potlatch feasts; one such bacchanal came to a tragic end when a warrior ate a box full of dried hemlock bark and washed it down with water. According to a turn-of-the-century ethnography of the Tlingit, "This caused the hemlock bark to swell and his stomach to burst."

As for more recent harms, you can't top Mort Hurst's Guinness World Record attempt in 1991. Hurst, a MoonPie-eating champ from North Carolina, suffered a stroke after eating 38 soft-boiled eggs in 29 seconds. He recovered and went on to compete again. Others weren't so lucky. In 2002, a 14-year-old schoolkid in Japan raced his friends at bread-eating, choked, and died. In 2004, a Japanese housewife choked to death on a wheat-rice cake at a contest in Hyogo prefecture. And just this January, a 28-year-old woman in California died of water intoxication after drinking almost two gallons of water in a contest sponsored by a morning radio show. She was trying to win a Nintendo Wii.

Kobayashi's invalidism is interesting because it doesn't fit any of the prior templates. It's not related to obesity or cardiovascular unhealth; like other top eaters these days, Kobayashi is a gym rat. Rather than the sudden trauma of an amateur, the Japanese eater's jaw distress seems to be a form of temporomandibular joint disorder either caused or exacerbated by sheer overuse of the jaw. This makes sense. In recent years, American eaters have nearly matched the great one in raw stomach capacity, meaning that the champ has been forced to rely more on the physical attribute that makes him unique. Kobayashi's go-to body part isn't his stomach, as many mistakenly believe, but his uncommonly strong jaw, coupled with a loosey-goosey esophagus that he can apparently relax at will. On his blog, he compared his sore jaw to a pitching injury. It's like Orel Hershiser tearing his rotator cuff in 1990. That shoulder just frayed and frayed and then finally ... ripped.

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Jason Fagone is the author of Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Photograph of Takeru Kobayashi on the Slate home page by Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I used to think that professional wrestling "matches" and monster truck "contests" were the lamest "sports" ever broadcast--something only an idiot could enjoy. It turns out there's something even lamer and more disgusting: competitive eating. Why, oh why, would anyone want to watch contestants shoving fistfuls of pre-mangled food down their grease-and-slobber-smeared faces? What's next? Farting contests? Speed-pooping matches?

It used to be said that monster truck contests were invented so professional wrestling fans would have someone to look down on. Now, it seems, monster truck fans are no longer at the bottom of the barrel.

--fingerpuppet

(To reply, click here.)

We seem to be addicted to the idea that individually each one of us is "above average" at something and somehow this should translate into our 15 minutes of fame. Why is is so bad to be average or just lead a quiet life of useful anonymity?

So, people are willing to eat themselves sick or, rarely even, dead for some fame and a bit of applause.

--differnetEllen

(To reply, click here.)

(7/5)

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