Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit

by Ryan Nerz

  As the popularity of competitive eating has surged, the Sheas claim that other sports have sensed the threat and gone on the attack. George points to repeated attacks at contests by “rogue members of the curling community.” At one particular contest, George recalls a verbal barrage from an unknown group of hecklers. Looking out into the crowd, he saw signs that read CURLING ROCKS! EATING IS NOT A SPORT. Rich Shea bears no hard feelings and can even empathize to some extent. “You gotta look at where they’re coming from. Global warming is a threat to their sport. They’re in a bad place.”

  Despite repeated attempts to reach out to the middle-aged female demographic, the Shea brothers have found it a tough nut to crack. Dave Baer has pursued companies like Campbell’s in hopes of sponsoring a soup contest that might appeal to older women, but to no avail. The Sheas sincerely hope that, as changing social mores continue to reshape the roles of American women, the rise of female eaters like Sonya Thomas and Carlene LeFevre will help bring female competitive-eating fans into the fold.

  Though the IFOCE has always had a global focus, outside of Japan the league has struggled to penetrate the international marketplace. Indeed, publicized eating competitions exist in England, Germany, Thailand, Ukraine, and Canada, but they remain the exception that proves the norm. The limiting factors for expansion include capital, manpower, and the assumption that social acceptance in some countries may be an uphill battle, especially considering America’s beleaguered reputation abroad. That said, Dave Baer receives frequent e-mail requests from countries like Nigeria, China, and Latvia. In 2004, the IFOCE nearly signed a contract to host a plum dumpling-eating contest in the Czech Republic. Soon thereafter, Dave Baer claims that a contract for a contest in Liberia was quashed in the eleventh hour due to security concerns. “The bulk of the budget was for security,” Dave recalls, “because there was a civil war going on there. We sent them a proposal that included a $25,000 security detail.”

  The IFOCE’s repeated attempts to be accepted as an Olympic sport have been coldly snubbed, and the feud with Jacque Rogge, head of the International Olympic Committee, has gotten ugly. When Rich Shea went on record claiming that Rogge was “just in it for the frequent-flier miles,” the otherwise stoic Belgian was doubtless ruffled but held his tongue.

  On April, 1, 2004, the IFOCE decided to take their dispute with the IOC to the streets. They kicked off a SPAM-torch run from Times Square in New York City, traveling twenty-four hundred miles down to the SPAMARAMA festival in Austin, Texas, where the first ever SPAM-eating contest would be held. “We figured if the Olympics won’t have us, we’ll create our own country club,” says George Shea. Dozens of runners from the Northeast to the Southeast participated in the first ever meat-based torch run, spreading a spirit of goodwill across the American heartland. “This torch run comes at a time of deep division in our nation,” an emotional George Shea said at a press conference. “The bipartisan outpouring of support for this effort gives one chills.”

  The scope of the Shea brothers’ ambition for the IFOCE knows no bounds. Besides acceptance into the Olympics, George Shea envisions a six-hundred-event circuit with thousands of eaters ranked regionally, nationally, and internationally. There will be so many events that eaters will become specialists in specific foodstuffs. Sprinters, distance eaters, soup slurpers, roughage specialists—all will have a place on the circuit, and the top twenty-five eaters will all be big earners. Rich Shea likens the future eating circuit to the PGA, in which all eaters will carry an official IFOCE-circuit ID card like the PGA’s tour card. “Circuit cardholders will be like Vijay Singh down to John Daly. And Daly or somebody’s gonna say I need to make my hundred grand so I’m going out as much as I can, whereas Singh is gonna only go to the majors where he can get some real cash.”

  If competitive eating really is becoming a globally recognized sport, what does that make the Shea brothers? Do they see themselves as coinventors of a new sport, as James Naismith was with basketball? Or do they liken their role to that of master sports promoters like Vince McMahon or Don King? Are they a modern version of Barnum & Bailey, or savvy league cocommissioners like the NBA’s David Stern? “We’ve been called the Ring Ding brothers,” George says. “And the Barnum & Bailey of Barf,” adds Rich. But really, despite the meteoric rise of America’s fastest-growing sport, the Shea brothers have a rather quaint vision of the competitive-eating circuit and their place in it.

  “It is very much like a fraternity in which we are the social chairs,” George observes. He then steps away from the analogy, explaining that several women are involved and that fraternities often connote “stupid rah-rah morons.” But call it what you will—an outlet for hobbyists, an Elks Club for misfits, a clubhouse for like-minded adults. This last analogy is perhaps most appropriate, because the lure that seems to draw eaters, fans, and journalists alike is the common bond of the circuit, the friends, the travel, the humorous spectacle, and the thrill of competition. The competitive-eating circuit is a haven for grown men and women to toss aside their worldly cares and act like kids again.

  Somehow, even as competitive eating grows globally and fiscally, the Shea brothers and Dave Baer continue to see it as a clubhouse they founded. “If money were no object,” says Rich Shea. “If I were, say, Paul Allen, then we’d have that old social club down on Mulberry Street. And Cookie Jarvis would be walking around. And there would be rooms where the LeFevres could stay when they were in the city. It would be like Beautiful Brian bringing out the coffee and Hal Schimel running around, serving up espressos. That, to me, is what the circuit is.”

  2

  The Gentle Gigantic Warrior

  Before doing battle, in the temple one calculates and will win, because many calculations were made.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  Badlands Booker gives love to the crowd as George Shea proclaims him the Pumpkin Pie Eating Champion of the World. His coffee-stained jersey would later be hung from the rafters at IFOCE headquarters. (Courtesy of Matt Roberts/IFOCE)

  When you meet Eric “Badlands” Booker for the first time, one thing is reasonably certain—you’ll spot him first. At six foot six, 440 pounds, he is quite simply an enormous human being. The embodiment of rotundity, his head and abdominal region look almost as if a small sphere has been placed atop a much larger one, snowmanstyle. The effect of his approaching figure brings to mind the Michelin Man, except that his skin is brown and his walk doesn’t fit the profile. He struts with a graceful rhythm that’s both athletic and confident, and his girth is not of the soft sort. He could be mistaken for a retired NFL lineman. But beyond the stunning approach of this manmountain in a New York subway conductor’s collared shirt, it’s the smile that really gets you. At the moment he recognizes you, Badlands’ face lights up in the most electrifying way.

  It’s June 28, 2003, and I’m meeting up with Badlands at Hooters in midtown Manhattan. The assignment, given to me by the sports editor of the Village Voice, is to share a training meal with one of America’s top-ranked gurgitators before the upcoming Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. The plan is to write a short, tongue-in-cheek piece, but my flippant research on the subject does not prepare me for Badlands’ dead-serious approach to competitive eating. By the time our waitress (clad in those humiliating orange polyester butt-huggers for which Hooters is renowned) comes by to take our order, I am nodding my head in earnest to Badlands’ personal recipe for gurgitory success. He has dubbed his formula the Four Tenets of the Sweet Science of Competitive Eating.

  The first prerequisite for competitive-eating success, he says, is stomach capacity. The stomach is just like any other muscle and must be trained accordingly. Just as biceps strength increases with each set of curls, “if you get the stomach muscle used to holding lots of food, it’ll adapt to the stress that you put it through during an eating contest.” A common misconception, Booker notes, is that the stomach stretches, inflating and deflating like a balloon. Actually, it unfolds like an a
ccordion. (My subsequent research on the subject proves him correct.)

  Booker says the method of choice for increasing stomach capacity is veggie training—“not hitting the buffet, not eating a whole bunch of fatty, greasy foods.” Instead, many pro speed-eaters sit down and gorge on large portions of fruits or vegetables. Each eater has his goto training foodstuff, Badlands explains. Ed “Cookie” Jarvis, for example, pounds down whole watermelons, seeds and all. Ray “the Bison” Meduna trains with cucumber slices. Badlands, for his part, goes with cabbage.

  “I’m like the Bubba Gump of cabbage dishes. I make all kinds. Bald cabbage. Savoy cabbage. Red cabbage. Cabbage with smoked turkey wings. Sometimes I have cabbage with seasons, like garlic and peppers. Sometimes I’ll put a whole lot of water in it—you know, saturated water cabbage. Sometimes I just eat it raw.”

  The other accepted technique for improving stomach capacity and elasticity is drinking copious amounts of water. As far as Booker knows, Cookie Jarvis holds the unofficial water record by downing a gallon in a minute and one second. Badlands has done it in a minute and five. When I suggest the prospect of a water-drinking contest, Badlands reveals just how scientific his approach to training is. “Yeah, I think liquid-centric sport would be a good look. But you gotta be careful with water-drinkin’, because you don’t want people to get waterlogged. What’s that called—hyponatremia?” I shrug, clueless. “Yeah, what happens is, when you drink a lot of water, your sodium levels drop. But, hey…we could do Gatorade!”

  The second ingredient in Badlands’ recipe for competitive-eating success is stamina. “In an eating contest, you can tell if someone’s tired when they start leaning. You notice Kobayashi eats with both hands, and he never leans.” To improve his stamina, Badlands works out on the elliptical machine three times a week. A brown belt in judo, he also spends several hours a week at the local dojo.

  The third factor is strategy. Badlands has read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and among its most memorable lessons is that a battle is over before it’s ever fought. For this reason, Badlands prepares so thoroughly for contests that he has actually been known to interrogate his competitive foodstuff beforehand. In the weeks leading up to the Fourth of July hot dog contest, for example, he starts by cooking up three Nathan’s Famous dogs and buns on his George Foreman grill. He then sits with the dogs and just stares at them, meditating, poring over every nook and cranny of their pink-brown, grease-beaded surfaces. Finally, the interrogation begins. “What’s the best way to eat you?” he asks the dog aloud. During one such inquiry, Badlands remembers his son Brendan slinking into the room. “What you talkin’ to those dogs for, Dad?” he asked.

  But Badlands maintained his focus. Over six years, he developed a hot-dog-eating technique that was uniquely his own. He studied the tapes of past Nathan’s Famous contests and tested the myriad eating styles. He tried former American hot dog champ Ed Krachie’s Chunk ’n’ Dunk method, which is basically to dunk hot dog and bun in water, then eat, then repeat. He tried the traditional Japanese method, perfected by Nakajima in the late nineties. Nakajima’s innovation was to separate dog and bun, to eat the dog, then dunk the bun and eat it. He sampled the traditionalist method of just eating the hot dog. And finally, he tried the method of the master himself, Takeru Kobayashi, dubbed the Solomon Method. Kobayashi’s method is to break the dog in half and eat it in rapid-fire bites. He then breaks the bun in half, dunks it, and eats it.

  “But I’m physically bigger than Kobayashi, so why break it in half?” This leap of logic led to Booker’s pioneering method, nicknamed the Double Japanese. He takes two dogs and devours them bite by bite. Then he takes two buns, dunks them, and eats them one at a time. At first, he ate them both at once, but soon ran into the formidable obstacle of an overstuffed mouth. “That’s one of the biggest problems a competitive eater has. Because once you stuff your mouth, it takes a long time to chew that down.”

  The final tenet of the Sweet Science of Competitive Eating is the most important one of all, Booker assures me. Before and during a contest, a gurgitator must have a strong, focused mind. “You must have your game face on,” he says, serious as a heart attack. “You must be in the Zone. You must be one with the dogs.”

  To maintain his focus, Badlands often meditates before a competition. He learned to meditate from his judo sensei. At the end of each judo session, the entire class does a cool-down meditation. “You know, inhale the positivity and exhale the negativity…oxygenate your body.” Before most contests, he employs these same techniques. He puts his arms out to his sides, fills his lungs with oxygen, and focuses his mind on the task at hand—which is, of course, eating massive amounts of food in a short time.

  At this point, I’m jolted into reality by the sudden appearance of a pair of hooters. It’s the waitress, stopping by to check on our progress with the small trough of buffalo wings that lies between us. She asks why we are tape-recording our conversation, and I explain that the guy sitting opposite me is a world-class competitive eater. On cue, Badlands offers to show her his wing-eating technique. He grabs a wing, or a “paddle” as they’re known on the circuit, breaks the joint between thumb and forefinger, puts it in his mouth, and strips it across his teeth. When it resurfaces, the bones are stripped clean. Badlands asks me to try it, and my attempt to duplicate the technique is futile, bordering on sad. Our waitress’s reaction hovers somewhere between amusement and disgust. She doesn’t seem to recognize the talent involved. I guess some people just don’t get it.

  JUNE 2, 2004

  “There’s a challenge here…it’s the number thirteen, called the Molicious, named after the baseball player Mo Vaughn. The challenge is, they have this sandwich that’s as tall as a skyscraper…”

  It’s a year later, and Badlands and I are engaged in yet another training meal for the Fourth of July Nathan’s Famous contest, which I have just learned I will be co-emceeing. We are seated in the back room of the fabled Carnegie Deli in midtown Manhattan, chewing on a pair of ginormous sandwiches filled with softball-sized lumps of kosher deli meats. With each bite, Badlands accomplishes the competitive-eating equivalent of lapping me. And somehow, his steady devouring does not prevent him from explaining the Carnegie Deli Challenge, which only six humans have been able to achieve.

  The Mo-licious more than lives up to the appetite of its namesake, Mo Vaughn, a 270-pound former first baseman for the Mets. It’s a three-and-a-half-pound sandwich, composed of a pound of corned beef, a pound of cheese, and a pound and a half of turkey. Stuffed between four slices of rye bread, the sandwich is slathered with Russian dressing and precariously held together with two-hundred-millimeter skewers. “So the challenge is,” Badlands explains, “if you have the stomach to order one, and you eat the whole thing, then you get the second one for free.”

  The second one? Just as I have begun to imagine myself, after an ascetic Ramadan-style forty-eight-hour fast, coming here to assume my rightful place in the annals of competitive eating, my hopes are dashed. Judging from my slowing pace with a plain old corned beef sandwich, I will never achieve what awaits the rare Carnegie Deli Challenge victor…an autographed picture on the wall. “You be up on the wall with slimmies like Alfred E. Neuman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liv Tyler, Doc Gooden, the Catwoman Halle Berry,” Badlands says. “You be up there with them all, just chillin’, for the whole world to see.”

  Of the other iron-stomach gurgitators who have done the Challenge—including Don “Moses” Lerman, Cookie Jarvis, “Krazy” Kevin Lipsitz, and Leon “Justice” Feingold—the one who did it with the most panache was a svelte Japanese woman, Takako Akasaka. When she did it back in the eighties, she effortlessly knocked down the two sandwiches and about ten cups of tea in a cool forty-five minutes. It took Badlands over an hour.

  A lot has changed for Badlands in the past year. He has defended his matzo ball title and his fan Web site is up and running. But most importantly, he has just released his debut competitive-eating-themed hip-hop album: Badland
s Booker: Hungry and Focused. “The Sweet Science of Competitive Eating,” not long ago a mere concept, is now the title of the album’s third song. It’s a head-nodder with Badlands’ lyrical formula for gurgitating greatness laid over a loop from Thomas Dolby’s eighties rock hit “She Blinded Me with Science.”

  No bunson burners, or beakers

  Just a competitive eater in sneakers

  Keep ya lab coats and ya pocket protectors,

  And your shirts and ties while I’ll electrify

  And gain world records, scientific methods

  Journey begins, ask myself questions

  Who’ll be there, what are we eating

  When it’s taking place, and why I’m competing

  Figure that out, begin the research

  Plan out the details to come in first

  Educated guesses, hypothesis

  Through research, conduct experiments

  Like training runs, cabbage by the ton

  Twenty-one sticks of bubble gum

  To excercise the jaw, the check and jowl

  Rip meat off bone. Ya feel it louuud!

  When asked about his childhood, the conversation focuses on two of Badlands’ obsessions: food and hip-hop. He was born in Queens, on February 20, 1969. “I like to say that when they stepped on the moon, I stepped out the womb…first thing I grabbed was a fork and a spoon.”

  Growing up in a rough neighborhood in southeast Jamaica, Queens, Booker always had an uncanny appetite. “Every refrigerator magnet my parents had, had tooth marks on it,” Booker says, laughing. “I tried to devour it.” His mother and aunt were both excellent cooks, and he found himself going back for seconds and thirds. On the other hand, his grandmother was woefully mediocre in the kitchen. He now credits her meals for his “strong mental training,” which has helped him eat unsavory foods competitively.