by Ryan Nerz
Since condiments are generally eschewed by gurgitators as excess baggage, I keep waiting for Cookie’s cocktail-sauce plan to backfire on him, but as other eaters start hitting the wall, Cookie takes a commanding lead. The corned beef is sliced thin, but it’s lean and salty, a smidgen dry and quite chewy. Jarvis dips each beef slice in the cocktail sauce, and the lubrication seems to be reducing his chewing time. As for the cabbage, it goes down fast out of the gate but sits heavy as the contest wears on.
In the end, Cookie Jarvis takes the $1,000 first-place prize with six pounds in ten minutes, cementing his narrow lead over Sonya Thomas as the top-ranked American eater. Second, third, fourth, fifth, and even sixth place are separated from each other by a few ounces. Leon Justice Feingold, a lawyer who only shows up for exclusive events, takes second with an impressive four pounds three ounces to narrowly edge out Hungry Charles by a single ounce. Beautiful Brian Seiken takes fourth with a nibble over four pounds, and then come Badlands, Crazy Legs, Krazy Kevin, and Allen Goldstein, all with over three pounds.
After the contest, a more festive atmosphere replaces the tension prior to the competition. Except for the ever-present accusations of cheating or poor judging, eaters seem to interact gregariously after competitions. Or maybe the eaters are just stuffed and taking the path of least resistance. Stuffed or not, several eaters grab what’s left of the samples that the J. Freirich Company have left for the press. I notice Don Lerman filling up a bag like a trick-or-treater on Halloween.
A reporter from the New York Daily News walks up to Cookie Jarvis and asks whether his ethnicity played a role in today’s win. “Yeah, I’m Irish,” Jarvis says.
“That’s funny,” George Shea interjects. “At the pasta-eating contest, you were Italian.”
9
Moses of the Alimentary Canal
America. The fruited plains, the land of milk and honey, the home of the Whopper. Yes, this is the land of plenty. And plenty isn’t nearly enough for competitive eater Don Lerman.
—Stephen Colbert, from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Don Lerman, disguised as either a 1930s-era gangster or the “Hamburglar,” poses for the paparazzi before an eating contest.
SEPTEMBER 25, 2001.
Hundreds of rabid fans have assembled inside the Barker Hangar, a gargantuan soundstage in Santa Monica, California, to cheer on the world’s premier gurgitators for the biggest televised event in competitive-eating history: the Glutton Bowl, a two-hour, multidisciplinary chowfest produced by the Fox network. The crowd has just watched Badlands Booker win the first round by decimating thirty-eight hard-boiled eggs in ten minutes.
The second-round eaters have been introduced and are now awaiting the arrival of the competitive foodstuff, the specifics of which they have been given no prior knowledge. A giant barrel descends from the ceiling and slowly tilts forward. As hundreds of yellowish sticks fall from the sky to collect in a Lucite bucket at the front of the stage, the crowd emits a collective groan. Unsure whether to believe their eyes, the announcer confirms their suspicions: The competitive foodstuff is butter.
From the moment the bell rings, the bearded eater at the far left end of the table jumps to a commanding lead. While the other eaters are waging a one-on-one battle with their gag reflexes, the bearded man eats with reckless, almost terrifying abandon. “He’s eating very quickly now,” announces George Shea. “Watch that! He has a sort of rabbitlike jaw movement.”
The man is Don “Moses” Lerman. A five-foot-eight-inch, 172-pound Long Island native, Lerman is one of the IFOCE’s most dedicated and fearless eaters. With an unruly black beard and a gaze of almost animalistic intensity, Lerman’s nickname seems oddly fitting. Judging from his outfit—a T-shirt with a silk-screened picture of himself as the biblical Moses, and a baseball cap with the Ten Commandments tablets embroidered on it—Don has apparently embraced the nickname with his entire being.
The JumboTron screen behind the stage focuses briefly on an eater known as Justin “Lean Mean Eating Machine” Connoly. His discomfort is painful to watch. The crowd stares transfixed as he staves off the urge to retch three times within a matter of seconds. The effect on the watcher is that of absolute empathy—you feel yourself retching with him and can’t wait for this torture to end.
Don Lerman, however, almost seems to be enjoying himself. He attacks each stick with a rapid-fire succession of minibites, coming at it from all angles. Pow pow pow pow pow! Like that, he’s ingested a half stick of butter. He takes a few chews, swallows, then goes at it again. “Watch how Lerman gnaws away at that butter like a squirrel!” Mark Thompson, Shea’s co-emcee, exclaims.
By the three-minute mark, he has built such a substantial lead—two full sticks ahead of the nearest competitor—that you can’t help but wish he would just go easy. But not Don. Trying to capture the extent of Lerman’s commitment for the wide-eyed audience, George Shea describes Lerman’s daily training routine. “He eats one meal a day, and he eats it competitively. Six hot dogs, fourteen hot dogs. He sets a timer, and when he steps away from the table, he’s done eating for twenty-four hours.”
As the final seconds tick away, and with a commanding threestick lead, Don masochistically rifles down an entire half stick of butter. After the buzzer sounds and the referee grabs Don’s shoulder, he licks all ten fingers clean, evidently to give himself a sense of closure. He is about to go in for one final lick when the referee forcefully grabs his hand and lifts it to declare him champion.
“Folks,” George Shea announces, “this is a man dedicated beyond all reason.”
It’s June 28, 2004, and Don Lerman has just picked me up from the Long Island Rail Road station in a car-truck contraption that looks remarkably like a space rover. Just as I begin to imagine us entering a parallel universe with Lerman as my guide, we pull into the driveway of his Levittown, New York, home. It’s a nice white two-story house that seems especially spacious considering its only other resident is a French bulldog named Cammie. In fact, the house is so nice, with alabaster lions and pristine topiary bushes guarding the driveway, that I can’t help but wonder what kind of dough this day-old-bread-shop owner was pulling in before he retired. But that can wait. For now, I just want to hear about the butter record.
“It’s not like you’re eating ice cream or whipped cream, where it gives you some great taste,” Don explains. “Eating butter is much harder than it seems.”
“I somehow doubt that,” I say. “Seems pretty hard.”
Don explains that the hard part wasn’t that he dislikes the taste of butter—quite the contrary—but that he’s used to eating it in much smaller quantities, and as a complement to other foods. The grease, he explains, is overpowering, which comes as no major surprise considering that the 7½ sticks of salted butter he ate in five minutes contain 3,750 calories, 49 grams of fat, 113 milligrams of cholesterol, and 26 grams of saturated fat (130 percent of the recommended daily allowance.) Cholesterol-wise, eating two pounds of butter has the same effect as downing twenty quarter-pound burgers with cheese. Saturated-fat-wise, it’s like guzzling a jug of melted Crisco. On a positive note, however, it does contain 30 percent of the RDA for vitamin A. I ask Don what the aftereffects were like. Butter in mass quantities, it turns out, is an extremely effective laxative: “Everything went out. I mean, I had a piece of undigested fruitcake from six Christmases ago.”
If the IFOCE had an award for Lifetime Gastric Distress, it would go to Don Lerman. His biggest titles include some of the most grueling disciplines in competitive eating: butter, jalapeño peppers, and baked beans. The record he set on that historic day at the Glutton Bowl is so staggering that it will likely never be broken. In the documentary Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating, Crazy Legs attempts to match Lerman’s butter feat, only to fail in a graphic and audible way. After a series of heavy sighs and penetrating belches, Conti gives up. “No más,” he says, throwing up his hands. “Don definitely has the mental stability to eat as much
butter as possible, whereas I didn’t enjoy it so much.”
Jalapeño peppers were similarly challenging. Don has won two separate jalapeño-eating contests. In one contest, held in the border town of Laredo, Texas, Don ate 120 peppers in fifteen minutes. His nearest competitor ate 60. Don trained daily for the contest, eating peppers and downing multiple bottles of Tabasco sauce.
Though he had the intestinal fortitude to handle the heat during the competition, that was just the beginning. The real work of a jalapeño-eating contest comes afterward and can last for days. After the jalapeño victory, in his Laredo hotel room, Don’s burning gullet kept him up all night, moaning and praying for mercy. When he awoke the next morning, his body was still en fuego. Not until a giant buffet dinner that night did he start to feel some relief. “It’s the only contest on the circuit that’s an endurance contest,” Don says.
He did another jalapeño contest in Milwaukee, and the peppers there were even hotter. They were served in glass bowls because they were acidic enough to burn holes in metal. Halfway through the contest, Don claims his lips and tongue were completely numb: “You could have done dental work without the Novocain, no exaggeration.”
When it comes to postcompetition elimination, Don is a purist. “I don’t use no laxatives, and I don’t throw up my food. I do the water, and I let it come out naturally.” To describe the unique aftereffects of attempting to eliminate so many jalapeños, Lerman offers up the following joke: On a dare, a guy eats a fiery jalapeño, underestimating its power. Afterward, his friends give him ice cream to cool off. Later, while going to the bathroom, it burns so bad that he yells out, “Come on, ice cream!”
Don discovered the extent of his iron constitution as a young man, when his stomach passed the ultimate test. His grandmother was in the hospital in Brooklyn, extremely sick, with only a few weeks to live. Don’s mother made some chicken soup—“Jewish chicken soup…penicillin.” The family drove from their home in Queens to visit his grandmother daily for three weeks. One day, Don’s mother called from the hospital and asked if he’d had anything to eat. “Yeah, I had some of that chicken soup in the fridge,” Don said.
“What soup?” his mother yelled. “I made that like a month ago!”
Panicked, Mrs. Lerman drove home and picked up her son, grabbed the soup from the fridge, and took them both to the hospital. When she showed the soup to the doctor, he was stunned by its green tint and gelatinous consistency. “Talk about penicillin,” Don explains. “That chicken had turned to penicillin.” The doctor took one look at the soup and said that the chicken had turned to ptomaine. If Don had eaten it recently and wasn’t already feeling deathly ill, then his innards were something of a minor miracle. A digestive system like that, the doctor explained, could tackle the local diet in most Third-World countries. Many years later, in Lerman’s chosen sport, this innate talent would prove extremely useful.
From a young age, Don tells me, he was a fresser, the Yiddish term for a “big eater.” His mother, however, was a lousy cook. “I just couldn’t take her food. She put no love into it.” By some cruel stroke of misfortune, his mother’s mother was even worse. Though his father’s side of the family had better skills, Don learned the hard way that being finicky wouldn’t get him fed. When I mention my Flavor Advantage Theory—that it’s easier to eat food competitively if you enjoy the taste—Don adamantly shakes his head no. A true professional gurgitator should be able to eat all foods with equal speed and dexterity, he says, regardless of flavor.
As a kid with a hearty appetite, it was tough going. From the age of eleven, Don worked at various businesses around his Queens neighborhood—a drugstore, a dry cleaner, a grocery store—to get cash for take-out food. After work, he stalked all the Italian and Chinese take-out joints, looking for the best deals on the biggest portions. His favorite meal was the “Dinner for Five” at a local Chinese restaurant. He would set up shop at a table while the courses came in waves—egg-drop soup, two egg rolls, two shrimp rolls, a lobster dish, ribs, lo mein, chicken wings, roast pepper Chinese vegetables, four ice creams, and huge mounds of complimentary fried rice. Afterward, he felt full but not uncomfortable, and his metabolism was such that he always remained trim.
After high school, Don moved out to Long Island with his family and took on a succession of jobs. He worked at a warehouse, became a bank teller, and eventually started his own business, the day-old-bread store. He also served six years in the Marine Reserves, including a few years of stateside active duty during Vietnam. This experience inculcated a deep patriotism in Don, a sentiment that continues to motivate him in international eating competitions today.
At the urging of his nephew, Lerman entered his first eating contest in January of 2000: the Ben’s Kosher Deli Matzo Ball Eating Contest in Manhattan. With no training, he broke the record, downing twelve half-pound, baseball-sized matzo balls in two minutes and twenty-five seconds. Don loved the adrenaline rush and the shock that onlookers expressed at his lightning speed. “Look, he’s like a machine!” someone had yelled out. Afterward, Mayor Rudy Giuliani presented Don with the trophy and check. When describing the postcontest press conference, Don’s face lights up as if remembering a glorious halcyon day from his youth. “It was like a presidential press conference. It was a sea of cameras. You’ve got no conception. Reporters were everywhere.”
Don was hooked and began training. Already a heavyweight “buffet buster,” Don decided to up the intensity of his eating sessions at local buffets. He’d hit the buffet off 110th and Huntington for lobster and shrimp. Sometimes he’d hit the Indian buffet, “because it goes right through you…It fills you up very quickly, and there’s no weight gain.” He claims that every Chinese buffet restaurant within a six-mile radius of his home knows him by name. In terms of poundage, he estimates his capacity for a Chinese buffet meal at around ten to thirteen pounds. “No buffet ever made a dime off me,” he boasts. (When I imagine Don throwing this line out to single women, it seems suddenly less mysterious that he doesn’t have offspring.)
Don soon learned that buffet-busting alone wouldn’t suffice. He would have to devise eating techniques to keep him a step ahead of his opponents.
With hot dogs, Don found that the limiting factor wasn’t technique or stomach capacity, but swallowing. He needed to learn how to swallow larger amounts faster, without getting nauseated or triggering the gag reflex. Over time, aided by the expertise of his nephew, Don developed a theory about how to train his body not to get nauseated. “There’s a muscle at the end of the esophagus, the cardiac sphincter, which is the epicenter of nausea. That’s why you get nauseous in a contest.” Don’s nephew had discovered the cardiac sphincter in college, while trying to improve his skills with a beer funnel.
So how could Don train his cardiac sphincter? With water, or as he pronounces it in his New York accent, woitah. Don trained himself to down a gallon of water in under three minutes. He initiated a daily ritual: Each morning, he’d wake up, drink some coffee, then chug a gallon of water, fast. The first few times, Don described the cleansing effect as that of a “reverse enema.” Once that effect subsided though, he found he’d not only gained control of his cardiac sphincter, but his fast-paced stomach capacity as well. He liked to think of his training sessions as “internal workouts.”
Internal workouts still weren’t enough. Don felt that the physical duress of contests was such that overall fitness was important as well. He started running. The combination of water training and running, ironically, got him into the best shape he’d been in since his time in the Marine Reserves. Who’d have guessed that, to eat huge amounts of food, the best option would be to get into tiptop shape? Having quit smoking, Don’s competitive-eating training became a sort of replacement compulsion. When questioned about Don’s regimented lifestyle, even George Shea admits to being awestruck: “Here is a man who’s been eating fourteen hot dogs and buns every day this season, and then running four hours a day. No one asked him to do it. No one understa
nds exactly why he’s doing it.”
Indeed, outsiders might consider Lerman’s commitment to the sport extreme. During our interview, I brought up a quote I’d read that was attributed to Lerman: “I’ll stretch my stomach until it causes internal bleeding. I do it for the thrill of competition.” Before I could finish, he tried to interrupt, waving the question away. “My promoter didn’t like that,” he explained. “It was a joke. It was a joke. I don’t use that line anymore.”
Another aspect of Don’s intense commitment is that he seems to enjoy establishing and perpetuating rivalries. At the 2001 matzo-ball-eating contest, when Hungry Charles Hardy took the crown from Lerman, Hardy claims that one of Don’s relatives heckled him during the contest, and that Don himself wasn’t entirely amiable. They later patched things up at the Glutton Bowl, but only after a few chilly contests.
During our interview, Don mentioned that he’d like to go head-to-head with Jed Donahue, the perennial Laredo jalapeño-pepper-eating champ, who had missed the contest Don won because he’d broken his arm. Soon thereafter, I noticed that Don posted a picture of himself on his Web site in a cowboy hat and holding a gun, with the following caption below it: “Jed Donahue, I’m Gunning for You.”
Don reserved his most acrimonious words for a female bean-eating champ I’d never heard of. He had read about her bean-eating victory on Beautiful Brian Seiken’s Web site and was interested in a one-on-one challenge. Don’s prediction: “I’m gonna go against huh. I’m gonna destroy huh. I’m gonna pulverize huh. I’m gonna break huh.”