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

by Ryan Nerz

  At the halfway point, Kobayashi has thirty-three. He does an almost vicious twisting, full-body shake like a dog shaking out its fur after cavorting in a mud puddle. Shirota has twenty-six, Badlands twenty, Cookie and Sonya have eighteen, Hardy and Lerman fourteen apiece. I implore the crowd to give them some love to help push the eaters through the wall. Cookie takes time out to blow his nose on his towel. “The hot dog and bun is so difficult,” George adds. “It teaches humility to the arrogant, wisdom to the humble.”

  With under two minutes left, Kobayashi finishes number forty-eight and takes a sip of water. George is so into it his eyes are closed. “You and I see a hot dog and a bun. But he sees proteins and peptides and carbohydrates. He is like Neo in The Matrix. He sees the code, he breaks the code.” I break the news that Sonya has beaten her own women’s world record of twenty-five dogs. As Kobayashi hits his fiftieth, George starts the obvious chant: “Kobayashi! Kobayashi! Kobayashi! Kobayashi!” The Bun-ette recording his tally is Dani Franco, the director of the Crazy Legs documentary, and she’s having trouble keeping track. He has changed his method to downing dog and bun together, so she has to adjust. He breaks his record and everyone goes berserk. My voice is gone.

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five…”

  Kobayashi does one last shake, eats half of his fifty-fourth dog, claps his hands, and pumps his fist. I’ve never seen Kobayashi this psyched. He puts both hands up and lets out a yell that’s muffled by a mouth filled with hot dog detritus. A new world record has been set, the unthinkable topped by the even more unthinkable. Mike DeVito lifts Kobayashi’s hand, and George gives his final summation. “Add to looping strings and jumping quarks and bending gravity a new, unexplained phenomenon here, ladies and gentlemen. He is a personal friend of mine, a friend of us all, a citizen of the worrrld! Takeru Kobayashi of Japan!”

  After the judges convene, the final tallies are confirmed. Badlands and Rich LeFevre tie for fourth with twenty-seven, Sonya gets third and captures a new American record with thirty-two, Shirota finishes second with thirty-eight. And Takeru Kobayashi finishes with fifty-three and a half hot dogs and buns. In twelve minutes, he has consumed a total of 17,120 calories, almost 750 percent of the recommended daily allowance. He’s ingested 829 grams of fat—1,100 percent of the daily allowance. His total sodium intake is 24 grams, over 900 percent of the daily allowance. How does he look? Not unfazed, clearly, bending over at the waist, closing his eyes and sighing repeatedly—but not bad, considering.

  The feat seems all the more absurd when a stack of fifty-three dogs and buns are placed in front of him. The stack is the size of a fully developed one-year-old child. In the postmatch interview, George urges Kobayashi to lift his shirt and show his superhuman belly to the press. Kobayashi reluctantly agrees. The sight defies all logic and physics. His six-pack abs have been transformed into a turgid four-pack, but still one can’t see where it’s all being stored. “Ladies and gentleman, look at this man,” George Shea says, gesturing at Kobayashi’s stomach. “He looks like an anaconda who has just eaten a goat.”

  19

  Lunch with the Greatest Eater Alive

  During competition, as my stomach gets fuller, it gets harder to breathe. Toward the end, my lungs feel like they’re going to collapse. My shoulder muscles tighten up, and my hands start to shake. A cold, oily sweat washes over me, but I’m excited and full of energy. I negotiate with my stomach, ask it where I need to put the next hot dog, and plot the last spurt.

  —Kobayashi, to GQ magazine

  Dump. “Hai!” Swallow. Stack. Dump. “Hai!” Swallow. Stack. Dump. “Hai!” Swallow. Stack. Dump….

  The repetition is nauseating. Three Japanese men are seated at a table. To each man’s right is a waitress in a robe with a tray of bowls. In each bowl is a small portion of noodles in soy sauce. Each man is armed with his own bowl and a pair of chopsticks. The waitress dumps a bowl of noodles into the eater’s bowl, then she stacks her bowl on the table. The eater grabs the spaghetti-like noodles out of his bowl with chopsticks, pops them into his mouth, and swallows. Each dump, swallow, and stack takes about two seconds. Why the waitresses say “Hai!” after each noodle dump is beyond me.

  The young man on the left with the spiked hair looks like an anime character brought to life. The host has been calling him Takahashi. The guy on the right with the baby face is the only one who’s chewing the noodles, which is why he’s about to lose. The kid in the middle looks as if he could be anywhere between sixteen and twenty, with doe eyes, frosted hair, and an oval face. That’s Kobayashi. All you can see is his upper torso—the rest of his body is behind stacks of bowls. He’s eaten 175 bowls of noodles, but is miraculously losing to Takahashi, who’s put down 181.

  Hold up. Kobayashi’s gaining on him. He snaps his head back with each swallow in a way that reminds you of a pelican swallowing a fish. He limits all the variables, keeping his bowl just inches from his mouth. Takahashi raises his chopsticks to tell his waitress he needs a break. Bad Hollywood-epic theme music comes on.

  Kobayashi keeps bucking noodles back. Takahashi stops eating entirely—he looks as if he’s either going to hurl or die. Kobayashi has the contest in the bag and doesn’t need to keep up this pace. But he’s Kobayashi. He pounds his chest with his chopsticks, bounces on his chair, shakes, and smiles at a comment made by Yakamuro Yushi, the show’s host. When Yushi bangs the drum to end the contest, Kobayashi’s bowl count stands at 387. He has just eaten over twenty pounds of noodles in twelve minutes and has beaten Takahashi by 143 bowls.

  Welcome to TV Champion, a weekly Japanese TV show that focuses on three seemingly unrelated competitions—gardening, tilelaying, and eating. This episode aired on TV Tokyo in the summer of 2001. During the show, twenty-five contestants are eliminated in a series of events that include rice balls, meat buns, sushi, and noodles. Among the contestants who’ve been eliminated thus far is Nobuyuki Shirota and a bearded man who refuses to answer the host’s questions. Kobayashi’s prize for winning the tournament is a trip to New York City to compete with Kazutoyo Arai, the show’s cohost and the worldrecord holder in hot dogs, in the 2001 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Competition. Most of the show’s contests are twelve minutes long and thus serve as excellent training for Kobayashi. When the show moves on to Coney Island, the viewer has the satisfaction of knowing what the Americans don’t know yet, and what Kazutoyo Arai clearly fears—that this Kobayashi kid is going to kick everybody’s ass.

  Takeru Kobayashi, flanked by Sonya Thomas and Cookie Jarvis, negotiates with his stomach as he heads into the final sprint at the 2004 Nathan’s Famous contest. (Courtesy of Scott Eels/IFOCE)

  JULY 6, 2004

  I am sitting at a table with Kobayashi, his interpreter, Robert Ikeda, and both of their girlfriends at Sea, a Thai restaurant in New York’s East Village. Kobayashi and his crew are all hip dressers—they look more East Village than I do. Wearing a stocking cap and a muscle T-shirt, Kobayashi looks like a hipster with a workout fetish. He’s in incredible shape, with jacked biceps, thick shoulders, and a bulging chest. I’ve been concerned about footing the bill for Kobayashi’s lunch, but he says his jaw is still sore from the contest and seems more focused on talking about the Japanese circuit than eating. I suppose seventeen thousand calories will tide you over for a few days.

  Kobayashi explains that he’s the leader of the FFA, or Food Fighter Association. It is a group of the most elite competitive eaters in Japan, the best of which are Kobayashi and Shirota. He has lost to Shirota thrice, but each time it was in longer contests, anywhere from a half hour to an hour long. Most of the contests are televised events with prizes ranging between $50,000 and $100,000.

  Competitive eating, or ohgui, as it’s called in Japan, is Kobayashi’s occupation. In his first two years on the Japanese circuit, he made around $400,000. Kobayashi lives far away from his hometown of Nagano, in Nagoya, and I gather that this is due in part to the hassle of fans, stalkers, and paparazzi. Kobayashi isn’t o
verly forthcoming with intimate information, which I ascribe equally to Japanese decorum and to his being a legitimate celebrity. He requests that I don’t take pictures, as he is protective of his girlfriend’s identity. He would like to distance her from the potential wrath of thousands of rabidly jealous teenybopper fans.

  That said, the Japanese eating circuit has fewer competitions these days, ever since “the accident.” His interpreter, Ikeda, explains that on April 24, 2002, a fourteen-year-old Japanese kid choked on a piece of bread while challenging two classmates to a speed-eating competition. The kid spent three months in a coma before he died. (Five years prior to that, a contestant died in a Japanese sushi-eating competition.)

  Soon thereafter, television networks began to shy away from the contests due to liability concerns. In July of 2002, after TV Tokyo declined to cover the Nathan’s contest, the network’s New York bureau chief claimed it was due to fears of a potential Independence Day terrorist incident in Manhattan, which would cause their production crews to be stranded in Brooklyn. It sounded like a dubious excuse. Since then, though Kobayashi seems reluctant to confirm this, one source who recently visited Japan tells me the food-fighting circuit there had ground to a halt, but has begun to pick up of late.

  I change the subject and try to find out how he got started as a food fighter. Kobayashi says he’s always been athletic and extremely competitive. He played baseball from elementary school through high school and dreamed of being a baseball star. In his first eating competition, Kobayashi remembers being annoyed by the derisive tone of the contest’s hosts. “They were displaying it like they were these fat freaks going out there. I was interested in it, but I thought they could make it more.”

  In college, while pursuing a business degree, Kobayashi decided to attempt a twenty-minute-long restaurant challenge that involved eating curry rice. On his first attempt, Kobayashi broke the all-time Japanese curry-rice record. He ate seventeen bowls, or a total of about thirteen pounds of food. After graduating from college, Kobayashi was faced with an uncommon career dilemma: Should he become an accountant or a food fighter? The latter sounded more exciting.

  When I mention the rumors about Kobayashi—that he is taking muscle relaxants, has undergone stomach and/or esophagus expansion surgery, or is blessed with a second set of teeth—he just laughs. “I do things that people can’t understand or believe. That’s why they say things.” He adds that he doesn’t mean that in an arrogant way, and in fact he’s flattered by the rumors. “It’s wild that people would say that, when actually I’m just eating and there’s no trick to it.”

  So how does he do it then? Kobayashi gives a one-word answer: discipline. He trains. Two months before a contest, Kobayashi starts religiously building up his stomach capacity. For any given contest, he gives himself a capacity goal and keeps training until he reaches it. For the Nathan’s contest, he trains with healthier foods until the end of the cycle, when he starts focusing on how to attack the particular competitive foodstuff.

  Over the first half of the training period, Kobayashi gains a tremendous amount of weight. To illustrate this, he pulls out his cell phone to show me a picture of himself from two months before. At that point, around the beginning of June, he weighed over 180 pounds. He doesn’t look fat exactly, but he’s chunky with pudgy cheeks. Over the next month, he lost all the weight he’d gained—around forty pounds—with vigorous weight training and exercise. In keeping with the Belt of Fat Theory, he believes that if some of the heavier American eaters lost weight, their capacity and speed would increase and they’d be “pretty invincible.”

  The most difficult and important part of training involves getting the swallowing technique down. The concept is not much different from what a sword swallower does—he teaches his esophagus to relax and not close up while swallowing unchewed food. “Anyone in the world can stretch their stomach to what I stretch mine to,” he says. It takes extensive training, however, and a certain reckless bravery to relax one’s esophagus and condition the brain to ignore the gag reflex.

  Being a champion food fighter, he explains, is as much mental as it is physical. “If your mental game is weak, you’ll stop at your mental limit and you won’t go to your physical capacity,” and vice versa, Kobayashi says. As an example, he says that in 2003 he was physically prepared, in terms of stomach capacity and swallowing speed, but the excessive humidity threw off his mental toughness, which is why he finished with a disappointing forty-four and a half hot dogs and buns.

  Despite reports to the contrary, Kobayashi says he doesn’t meditate as part of his training. He is a secular Buddhist, but it doesn’t play much of a role in his training. His mental training for eating contests involves focusing and getting pumped, much as he does when he works out. Ikeda, his interpreter, assures me that Kobayashi is extremely strong. “I took him to my gym once, and all the big guys were trippin’ on how much he can lift.” I tell Ikeda that I’ve heard Kobayashi talks to his stomach before competitions. Is it true? After a protracted discussion with Kobayashi in Japanese, Ikeda turns to me. “He says he doesn’t really talk to his stomach, but he does feel that his stomach has its own soul.”

  Whoa. My eyes widen, and I start scribbling in my notebook. This is as close as I’ve come to confirming that Japanese dominance in competitive eating has a spiritual component to it. This possibility, which I believe has some basis in truth, would shatter all notions of eating competitions as mere exercises in gluttony.

  Kobayashi says that the contests are more difficult in Japan than in America. Usually, they are longer, which really tests stomach capacity. One contest is called Weight Crash, where eaters are weighed before and after eating Japanese buffet food for forty-five minutes. The most weight he has ever gained in Weight Crash is twenty-six and a half pounds—twenty-six and a half pounds! Imagine the food coma! Imagine the aftereffects! George Shea’s analogy of an anaconda ingesting a goat seems not at all hyperbolic for such a feat.

  Kobayashi explains that he has suffered the only defeats of his career in these longer contests—three times, all to Shirota. Some Japanese contests are the opposite—two-minute sprints. The Nathan’s Famous contest, he explains, is a sort of middle-distance competition where he is not quite sprinting but also cannot reach his full capacity.

  Once Kobayashi seems warmed up—he is laughing and says he enjoys the food—I decide to ask some slightly more invasive questions. I’m worried that I’ll ask something that won’t translate well or will offend some Japanese sense of propriety I don’t understand. What does he think of drug testing? He’s all for it, he says, though he can’t imagine what they would test for. Oddly, right after he answers the question, he pulls out a couple pills from his girlfriend’s purse and takes them with water. “What’s that?” I ask. Kobayashi laughs. Vitamins, he answers. He takes lots of vitamins.

  So what happens after the contests? In other words, how does he, uh…get rid of the…you know…Before I can finish, Ikeda’s phone rings. It’s the producers from the reality TV show Average Joe. They want people on the show who can do crazy feats to impress the women. Once Ikeda hangs up, he doesn’t force me to keep stammering awkwardly and gets straight to the point. “Are you asking if he throws it up or shits it out?” Ikeda says. Uh, more or less, I say.

  Ikeda says it’s a normal question and discusses it with Kobayashi. Kobayashi says he just drinks lots of water to flush it out. The resulting bowel movements are, just as you would suspect, voluminous and frequent, he says without elaborating. As for vomiting, that is against the code of the Food Fighter Association. I imagine a band of ninja eaters who, when they discover a traitor going to the bathroom to purge after a contest, force him to commit hara-kiri. “It’s about pushing yourself to the limit and holding on,” Ikeda says. “So after a match, if you throw up, you’re not holding on…. The guys who don’t puke are the strong ones.” Kobayashi interrupts Ikeda with a stream of Japanese, and Ikeda turns to me again. “He said, ‘The day I throw up is t
he day I retire.’ ”

  The only time I strike a sensitive cord is when, after Ikeda says Kobayashi would not participate in a TV show where they make fun of the sport, I ask about their participation in the Fox show Man vs. Beast. Without parlaying the question to Kobayashi, Ikeda says in a defensive tone, “I mean, they weren’t making fun of the sport.” I explain that I didn’t mean to insinuate that the show was demeaning. Ikeda says that Kobayashi met Carl Lewis on the set before the contest, so it felt like a real sporting event. He felt honored to compete among fellow physically gifted masters of their respective disciplines.

  Man vs. Beast is a show in which humans test their mettle against animals. It’s among the most entertaining reality TV shows I’ve ever seen. A sumo wrestler competes in tug-of-war against an orangutan, a chimpanzee faces a Navy SEAL on an obstacle course, a sprinter runs the hundred-meter dash against a giraffe and a zebra, and an 8,800-pound elephant competes against forty-four little people in pulling a DC-10 aircraft. Highlights include the orangutan’s victory smile, the photo finish between the elephant and the little people, and the Navy SEAL’s contempt for his opponent, the chimpanzee, “I’ve sized up the enemy…it’s just a wannabe human.”

  The show’s first segment is called “Mean Scene of Cuisine.” It’s a bunless hot-dog-eating competition between Kobayashi and a Kodiak bear. The contest is emceed by Michael Buffer, the “Let’s get ready to rrrumble!” guy. The venue is a darkened, foggy soundstage with two raised stages surrounded by chain-link fences. In between the bear’s stage and Kobayashi’s are electrically charged wires that “hopefully will prevent the beast from bolting out of his ring and attacking Kobayashi.” If the bear is able to charge through the wires, the host explains, two game wardens are on hand with tranquilizer guns.