It’s time for the annual all-American rite of gluttony: Nathan’s Fourth of July hot-dog eating contest, the Super Bowl of the bizarre sport of competitive eating. The goal of this competition, held on Long Island, New York, is to down as many hot dogs as possible within the ten-minute time limit. Experienced contestants separate the dog from the bun, gobble the former, and then squash the bun into a lump to eliminate bulk, ingesting it with a gulp of water.
And this year Joey “Jaws” Chestnut set a world record: 69 hot dogs in ten minutes. That’s one hot dog every 8.7 seconds. And it beat his previous record (set in 2012) by exactly one dog. He might have done even better had his long-time rival, Takeru Kobayashi, the small Japanese guy with the big stomach, been present. But Kobayashi didn’t attend.
God bless America!
Those people have lost their marbles.
That is so gross!
Well, technically 75 less than a gross. 😀
Well, 69 hot dogs or 21,321 calories, 538 g saturated fat, 2,4 g cholesterol, 47 g sodium. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!
And that calculation did not include the buns.
The buns are about 100 calories each so that is 6900 more calories, about 28,000 calories in ten minutes! That’s nearly two weeks worth of food.
I’d strongly caution against putting much stock into nutritional calorie data. Those figures are derived from measurements with a bomb calorimeter, which turns whatever you put into it into ash. That is, it extracts all the chemical energy available via combustion.
You may have not noticed, but human waste isn’t exactly ash. Our metabolisms aren’t anywhere near so efficient.
Worse, our metabolic systems aren’t anywhere near so simple, either. Imagine enough celery for the bomb calorimeter to measure 1500 KCal and enough refined table sugar for the same measurement. You’d be hard pressed to eat that much celery in one sitting in the first place, and there won’t be any metabolic harm from it (though you won’t get as much protein and fat as you need on a daily basis). The sugar you could dissolve in some water and down it without much trouble. That’d be a gallon of soft drinks, but you don’t have to dilute it so much; think syrup, not soda. And you will have deleterious metabolic effects from even just a fraction of that amount of sugar.
Eat 500 calories of celery every day in addition to a balanced diet and you’ll be quite healthy. Consume 500 calories of sugar — a pair of 20-ounce Coke bottles — every day in addition to a balanced diet and you’ll quickly balloon with fat and develop Metabolic Syndrome (diabetes and cardiovascular disease).
Yet both are a 500 calorie-per-day addition to your diet.
Cheers,
b&
You may have not noticed, but human waste isn’t exactly ash. Our metabolisms aren’t anywhere near so efficient.
Oh, mine is rainbows & flowers. Isn’t everyone’s 😉
Sorry, I had to make my silly joke – carry on with the adult discussion. 🙂
I once naively ate more than a few stalks of celery at one sitting. From my experience I gather that it apparently and aptly gets its name from the Latin, “celeritas”. I certainly found myself moving in one sense or another with celerity.
One wonders why people spend obscene amounts of money on various nostrums to achieve the same results as can be had from a bowl full of salad….
b&
I reread the story and celery isn’t mentioned. 🙂
The aforementioned calories come mostly from fat & sugar. The calorie counts are from calorimetry measurements; however, zeroth order dietary guidelines are based on these numbers – absorption rates notwithstanding.
Of by, “zeroth order,” you mean “place an upper limit upon,” of course. But those numbers aren’t very useful in practical matters.
To even theoretically get useful data, you’d need to subject the…ah…digestive detritus to the same calorimetry; that’d at least narrow the range to something more closely approximating reality.
But it still presupposes an overly simplistic and naïve model of physiology that we’re nothing more than mechanical computers. Much of what we eat is incorporated wholesale into our bodies, without being oxidized.
Counting calories is the physicist’s diet — the one that starts by assuming that humans are frictionless spheres and never refines the model beyond that. It’s a fantastic model…if your goal is for your body to asymptotically approach the shape of the sphere you’re modeling….
b&
Yeah I know, it’s just a ball park figure to put this lunacy into perspective. (I am actually a nutritionist)
Obligatory juvenile correlation of “69” and putting wieners in his mouth.
But he chews them…better to skip it in this case.
Gives new meaning to the term, “fast food”….
There’s a place on the other side of town, up in Scottsdale, “Best of Europe,” that makes their own dried Polish kielbasa — the good stuff. Last time I was there, I noticed that they also had some frankfurters, and I decided that that’ll be the excuse to go there — not just to get some kielbasa but to get some hot dogs for a special occasion (such as the World Series).
But, no, I won’t be getting five dozen of them and try to eat them all in ten minutes….
b&
Come on if not eat all at once, try to put them in your mouth all at once! 😉
But…I like hotdogs! At least, the few good ones that remain…Boar’s Head is about the only commercial brand I know of worth eating.
And I’d like to continue to like them….
b&
Everyone likes them. But if you ever want to eat another, don’t do this. Quarter one length-wise. Put in the microwave on a real plate for one minute (turn microwave on). Let cool. Observe.
I like hot dogs but try not to think about what goes in to them.
I’ve read that the original purpose of the hot dog was to find a use for “meat” that would otherwise go to waste.
Had the pleasure of witnessing him live in 2007 where he broke the world record at 59 hot dogs. Kobayashi chickened out on that one also.
As I understand it, Kobayashi stays away because of a contract/money dispute, not fear of competition. Not sure that is any more admirable, but let’s be fair.
I don’t know whether he’s ever participated in the crawfish eating contest here during French Quarter Fest, but we’ve seen the ‘Black Widow’ several times. She’s won it for the past 3-4 years, always beating out her beefier competitors.
Has his blood cholesterol ever been sampled a couple hrs pre and post competition? He really ought to make that contribution to medical science.
How many dogs are consumed total by how many people in this competition, and is there any year-to-year standardization of the dog (like there is with baseballs etc?
And finally, how small would a dog need to be to be bested by the biggest c_t you could find in such a competition?
“Has his blood cholesterol ever been sampled a couple hrs pre and post competition?” See Comment 3 for a hint – he’s at about 10x daily recommended max for a healthy person with no history of heart problems and good cholesterol readings; it can’t be good.
A lot is going to depend on how often he does this sort of thing. If it’s only a couple / few times a year, it’ll be no worse than any other binge — not exactly healthy, but not significant over the long haul.
If he’s doing it every week or so, though….
b&
Maybe he purges after. I don’t honestly know how his digestive system could handle that without balking altogether. Hence my ick factor!
Probably. I don’t know what that high a cholesterol intake does but I’d be more concerned about the > 1 lb saturated fat and that big a hit of salt. Maybe the water helps with the latter.
I’m so glad Joey Chestnut’s effort went into achieving world peace. I hope he cures cancer next year.
Actually, I heard that as an announcement of his intention to compete in the Third International Whirled Peas Chug-Off, to be held later this year in Alberta….
Cheers,
b&
With so much hunger in the world, I dislike gluttony contests. Reminds me of Sheldon Cooper:
Leonard: “Hope you’re hungry!”
Sheldon: “Interesting. A friendly sentiment in this country, a cruel taunt in the Sudan”. (pause) “It’s a lesson in context.”
While I can appreciate the sentiment, it’s one that quickly makes it impossible to enjoy life.
“How can you, in good conscience, spend the extra $0.75 / pound on that premium rice when there are children starving in Asia who don’t even have any rice? Shame on you! You should buy the cheap rice and send the extra $0.75 to the starving children.”
Questions of unseemliness aside, probably less food was “wasted” in this competition than in a single typical busy restaurant over the course of a day.
And the modern problems of hunger are entirely sociopolitical ones, not ones of production. (That may change in coming decades with the exhaustion of cheap-to-process petroleum.) There’s far more than enough food to go around; the problem is getting it around.
Cheers,
b&
“There’s far more than enough food to go around; the problem is getting it around.”
I.e., making a good capitalist buck by getting it around?
That’s certainly part of it…though, to be fair, a fair amount also has to do with local politics plus shifting populations and shifting climate patterns.
Ethiopia, for example, was once one of the most fertile lands on Earth. Their cuisine is exquisite. Yet, in the West, when we think of Ethiopia and food, we generally think of starving children with distended bellies. Western imperialist capitalistic profiteering only plays a peripheral role in that state of affairs.
Cheers,
b&
It might help if everyone studied the Peak oil debate more – or it might make people go into a panic.
YT – BBCHardtalk, Fatid Birol, Chief economist of International Energy Agency Jan 11th 2013, interviewed by Stephen Sackur on 9th January.
At end of video Fatid warned of severe weather disruption due to global warming if we don’t dramatically reduce burning of fossil fuel. Also he pointed out that fossil fuels are going to be used up one day.
See http://odac-info.org/peak-oil-quotes
also http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/hubecon.htm
Here are some ideas that might be just too different for most people to accept:
M. King Hubbert back in 1960 recommended moving to a steady state economy. This would involve basically giving people rations of just enough food & other essentials guaranteed for life.
A radical solution would be to ban all car use. This would make the roads much more quiet and safer for cycling and pony & trap. If we set up pony & Hansom cab instead of taxis there would be many benefits. The ponies would require hay which would require many fields be changed to grass, this could increase amount of
clover available for bees and help save them too. The horse is the ultimate green energy engine. A Hansom cab owner could have a pony for morning and another for afternoon. This would create many jobs. The cabs could be made of carbon fiber like a modern Smart car sealed from wind & rain.
Battery power assisted bicycles are great fun and can be fitted with solar panels to help charge up while driving.
Possibly a lane on roads could be designated for bicycles & horses and two lanes for lorries ? That could be tricky
We should be reserving remaining oil for agricultural production & feedstock in manufacturing.
Get most people to do virtual travel using computer. Ban airtravel.
Can you imagine the economic disruption that would cause ? I think our situation is like the patient needs heart surgery but is too overweight to survive the operation.
See also Jeff Rubin, ” Why our world is about to get much smaller ” for Peak oil is real point of view. He was chief economist for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
Daniel Yergin, ” The Quest: Energy, security and the remaking of the modern world “, gives competing view that technology will get more oil out the wells than pessimists say. I think he might be like the Christian apologists – denying reality.
I spoke to a horse owner and she told me that it doesn’t suit horses to trot or canter on tarmac. So maybe these ideas are like kicking a dead horse.
If the road was covered with some sort of mat to reduce shock on horse then the mat probably wouldn’t suit cyclists. Also a mat would probably keep the tarmac damp then frost would act with that to accelerate break up of tarmac.
Possibly bicycle is only do able option ? If most goods & groceries were ordered online then it could be more efficient to have a delivery van dropping off to a town in sequence than everyone making individual trips in their own cars.
Jeff Rubin quotes. ” A barrel of oil contains 6.1 GJ equivalent to 1,700 kwh. The average monthly household electricity consumption in the US is 936 kwh or 11,000 kwh per year. So the 13 million barrels of oil used by American fleet would generate 221 billion kwh or enough for 2 million homes for a year.” tonto.eia
For a wild idea you would need to ban all internal combustion engine transport. One side of carriageway would be for bicycles and the other would need to be covered with sand / clay
mix of the sort common in old time U.S.A for horse travel pulling wagons. However the horses would only go at walking or amble speed. Talk about putting the breaks on.
There’s actually a much, much simpler solution to the question of how to power our transit infrastructure. And the good news is that we’re already headed in the right direction. Time will tell whether it’s fast enough.
You see, I live in a modest (~1000 square feet) suburban home. About 3/4 of the south half of my roof is covered in solar panels, and those panels generate half again as much electricity as I use. Indeed, the surplus is sufficient that, when I get an electric vehicle, I’ll be able to charge it for free.
If we were to cover all suburban homes in America, we’d generate enough electricity to supply the needs of the entire planet. If we expanded that to include commercial real estate, we’d generate enough to additionally supply the planet with hydrocarbon fuels by extracting atmospheric CO2 and processing it. And, again, that’s roof surface area in America supplying the entire planet’s energy needs.
The only other energy sources that can compete in the medium term are coal and nuclear, but both are significantly more expensive than solar. Coal is cheap to mine and burn, yes, but it’s damned expensive to clean the CO2 pollution from the atmosphere. And solar is already price-competitive at the utility scale with nuclear…and solar is getting cheaper while nuclear is getting more expensive.
The immediate danger is of price shocks as demand from growth increases while oil production starts to slip. The Great Recession is probably at least partially a symptom of the problem. The mid-term danger is of prolonged global depression as oil gets significantly more expensive as we continue to run out of the easy-to-exploit deposits. If we can rapidly transition our automobile fleet first to plugin hybrids such as the Volt and then to full electrics such as the Tesla, on a timeframe at least as fast as we’ve been transitioning to non-plugin hybrids, we might have a chance.
Maybe.
Cheers,
b&
When I was a graduate student at Tulane, about once a month we would all contribute a dollar, and someone would go buy shrimp or crayfish, whichever was cheaper. At one party we had boiled crayfish. There was a big pile of them on a table. My son was about a year and a half old. My wife and I stood at the table shucking and eating crawfish tails. We alternated putting a tail in this little hand which would stick up where we could see it over the table. My son consumed 52 crawfish tails.
To anyone who actually eats these things, watch this video from the How It’s Made series. And this is the good stuff!
http://youtu.be/CAn0PBjhwW4
That’s not the good stuff…the good stuff doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup and modified food starch, and it’s served still in the casing. And it’s certainly not manufactured in lots of hundreds of thousands per day!
b&
Also…the good stuff is just beef — no pork or chicken. I wouldn’t be surprised if the really good stuff is veal.
(I’m sure you could make a good Frankfurt-style sausage with a blend of meats, but I’ve never had one nor heard reference to one.)
Cheers,
b&
Yes, weißwurst is my guilty pleasure and really the only sausage that seems easy on the stomach. I say guilty because it’s veal. I haven’t eaten it in years but it’s delicious!
It’s a shame that there’s no place that would make such a thing conveniently near me. There’s that Polish place halfway to the Nevada border, and a German place halfway to the California border, but that’s about it.
Oh, sure, there are carnicerias all over town, but that’s different….
Cheers,
b&
That’s why I live in NYC. I can get walk a few blocks over for Galician tapas, then have a full dinner at my favorite Burmese restaurant nearby, authentic Italian gelato for dessert, and then a few pints in a real live Irish Pub. All withing walking distance from my apartment. And that’s just a tiny sample of what’s available. If you want sausage-type foods, we got Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, German, Austrian, Etc. Again, all withing walking distance. I love this town.
Sure…rub it in.
I was just in San Francisco a couple weeks ago for a cousin’s wedding. On the one hand, I’d note that it’s just like that. On the other hand…the city is only a seven-mile square, so of course everything is within walking distance.
In less than twenty-four hours, Mom and I ate Afghan food (at the Kabul Café — I’m sure the CIA perked up at that item on my credit card), had a Dim Sum brunch, got some Polish sausages, and had a sushi dinner. All of it quite good — and the proprietors all had thick accents to match the ethnicity on the nameplate.
Cheers,
b&
Mmmm dim sum. I learned MSG caused migraines when eating at a Chinese restaurant in China Town in San Francisco. It wasn’t the good dim sum place I went to before.
… And only $30 per sausage. 🙂
At age 8 I ate two hotdogs with mayonnaise a little too hurriedly. Not a good-tasting “expectoration.” I now treat them with much more respect and “due diligence.” Years later, when I left the navy (last duty station was a 500-ft. ship) I took a sailboat (45-ft. sloop) trip. Got seasick all over again. Mandarin oranges provide a much more aesthetically-pleasing “expectoration.” 🙂
Nadir of civilization right there?
I love food so it seems all the more painful to see the endeavour of eating food turned into a form of “who can bear the torment?”
Ok, maybe that’s hypocritical of me since I enjoy the show Man Vs. Food. But I watch that show not for the food contest; I watch it for the incredibly yummy eats Adam investigates leading up to the contest portion.
Anyway, hot dog eating contests are a perfect example of the competitive mindset found at it’s most intense in the USA.
It seems nobody can simply leave ANY activity alone, as something simply done for pleasure, or for it’s own sake. Anything anyone does, anything anyone dreams up almost immediately is put into competition by someone somewhere.
You could take anything, say something like “You know, I get a simple pleasure out of making my bed each morning” and there will be someone to tell you: “You can COMPETE in that, you know!”
Vaal
+1 on the hypocrisy front: watching the hot dog bloke makes me want to punch Jesus in the face… and yet I can’t help liking Man v Food.
I prefer the glucose-responsible oeuvre of “Hungry” Todd Rungry. Let there be pake.
Please don’t promote this obscenity.
Agreed, but the tone of the post is not exactly supportive or complimentary.
One assumes Jerry’s ‘God bless America!’ was intended ironically…
(Damn, that was a response to Tony Sidaway’s and Dave’s comments above…)
Just thinking about this makes me want to vomit.
I don’t think we should be glorifying people who do things to wreck their bodies and to waste food.
How ’bout a hot dog “feeding” contest, where we see how many hungry kids one can feed in 10 minutes?
I couldn’t manage 69 hotdogs in even a period of 69 consecutive days. I eat one hotdog about twice a year so it would take me roughly 35 years to reach that tally.
I’ve never seen any reason to relish these events.
Care to garnish that response with any additional tidbits so the rest of us might catch up with your thinking?
b&
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