CONWELL'S COMMENT
Menu items sound a little less than appetizing
Kent Conwell

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm kind of slow. I don't keep up with much of the current goingons, figuring most of what's taking place is only a rehashing of events from the past five or six decades.

Such an attitude can be a perfect setup for a big surprise, as I discovered. The other day, I stumbled on to an event (yes, even a blind dog finds a bone from time to time) that, given the hopeless mentality of our globe, will undoubtedly become one of the featured Olympic competitions, overshadowing those intrepid, anxiously anticipated contests like archery, air rifle, kayaking, and water coloring.

So, what is this competitive sport lurking on the horizon, all bunched to make its jump to the world's most recognizable competition?

I thought you'd never ask.

It is the glutinous, gurgitating sport of competitive eating.

That's right. Competitive eating.

Hold on, hold on.

I'm like you. I had no idea competitive eating was such a growing sport;(Sport? Well, I don't know. We'll have to see.) but the other day, I ran across a couple articles that piqued my curiosity.

Now, all I knew about competitive eating was that around the Fourth of July, someplace up around Long Island always hosts a hotdog eating contest that is usually won by a skinny Asian gentlemen who could somehow put two hundred pounds of hotdogs into his one hundred and fifty pound body in eighteen minutes.

All right, all right. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little, a tad, but a few years back, Takeru 'The Tsunami' Kobayashi downed fifty and a half hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes. Kobayashi weighed 113 before the contest and 120 after.

The truth is, I had no idea competitive eating was such a widespread attraction. Sure, I'd noticed the hot dog eating contests, but I had no idea this sort of competition was a year around venue.

There exists, in fact, an International Federation of Competitive Eating, IFORCE.

No, no, no, no. I'm not kidding.

And this organization keeps a list of records for everything from twenty-four inch pizzas (7 ½ extra large bacci pizza slices in fifteen minutes by Richard LeFevre) to deep fried asparagus (eight and a half pounds Tempura spears in ten minutes by Joey Chestnut).

I didn't know what to make of it all.

When I learned that in 2005, a tiny Asian woman by the name of Sonya Thomas downed almost eight and a half pounds of Vienna sausage in ten minutes, I almost dropped my teeth.

I figured this all had to be a farce, but I was wrong.

IFOCE has its own web site, guidelines, safety warnings (you know, 'don't try this at home,'), and record books. They even have their own store where you can purchase a multitude of items from shirts to CDs.

Now, I'm an open-minded guy. I figure if someone has his own thing going, more power to him. But the truth is, when I looked at some of the events offered by IFOCE, I began to get sort of queasy at my stomach.

I mean, beef tongue. Three pounds, three ounces of pickled beef tongue in twelve minutes. You read right. Pickled. I'd have tossed it back up after two seconds.

And then the baked beans. Would you believe that little Asian woman gobbled down eight and four tenths pounds in two minutes and forty-seven seconds?

Wow, I wouldn't have wanted to hang around there for the awards ceremony. But then, they probably handed out the awards immediately and got the dickens out of there.

There are over 125 categories of everything from watermelon to tamales to shoo-fly pie to Krystal Hamburgers to deep fried okra. There one even for 'cow brains.'

Remember the little skinny Asian guy? He sucked down 17.7 pounds of cow brains in fifteen minutes.

All I can say is you'd have to be blessed with cow brains to do any of that.

Kent Conwell is a retired Port Neches teacher and author. He can be reached at rconwell@gt.rr.com