After she put herselfthrough restaurant school and looked for new work, men told her, “Oh, you are awoman, you cannot do this.”

ll of the top eaters pre-moisten their food bydunking, which eases the food’s journey down the esophagus and kick-startsdigestion.

or a pat on the back, for achance to get noticed, to prove themselves, to make their kids and spouses proud.

Eating contests weren’t invented by the Shea brothers or their mentors, or even byAmericans. Anthropological studies and old copies of scurrilous newspaperssuggest that the will to gorge is universal. Speed and volume competitions pop upin Greek myth, in Norse epics, and even in what may be the first novel, TheGolden Ass, written in Latin in the second century A.D.:

Horsemen of the Esophagus

signs of societal decay”: threeinvolved corporate greed and congressional gerrymandering, and the fourth wascompetitive eating.

eration required its top talent to sign exclusive eighteen-month managementcontracts, and it had not been reluctant to shoot off cease-and-desist letters to3

he lions turned out to be eating asingle hot dog from different ends

“Ladies and gentlemen. It is said that pearls are the precipitate of sunlight, slowedand bent by the ocean until it forms a nugget of beauty inside the lowly mollusk.And likewise, this grilled-cheese sandwich is the precipitate of the divinespirit”—here the music shifts again, to a minor-key vamp, and Shea’s voice skewsdeep and dark—“captured here on earth in the most unlikely of places, deliveredto us in the image of the Virgin Mary!”

We cannot SEE!” Shea is saying. “We cannot HEAR! We cannot THINK!

“the governing body of allstomach-centric sport.” His hands, clasped together over his crotch

In fifteen minutes the championship will be decided. It’s an eating contest.Whoever eats the most grilled-cheese sandwiches in ten minutes wins $3,500. Theprize pot has attracted some of the world’s top competitors—people who eatunder the banner of the International Federation of Competitive Eating, orIFOCE. They consider themselves professional athletes. Guys like Eric“Badlands” Booker, a 420-pound subway conductor, rapper, and world championin the doughnut, corned-beef-hash, and cheesecake disciplines. “Hungry” CharlesHardy, who just half an hour ago had his right biceps tattooed with the initialsIFOCE. Ed “Cookie” Jarvis, a Long Island real-estate agent who embroiders hisnumerous eating titles onto a gargantuan flowing robe with his portrait airbrushedon the front, flanked by a lighting bolt. Rich and Carlene LeFevre, the FirstCouple of competitive eating—a pair of sweetly manic retirees from the outskirtsof Las Vegas. Carlene is a consistent top-five finisher, and Rich, nicknamed theLocust, holds records in Spam (six pounds in twelve minutes), chili (one and ahalf gallons in ten minutes), and corny dogs (eighteen and a half in ten minutes)

America’s greatest eater is also here. Sonya Thomas. Five foot five, 103 pounds.She calls herself the Black Widow, because she gleefully devours the males. Hereating titles are so numerous that promoters list them alphabetically: asparagus,baked beans, chicken nuggets, chicken wings, eggs, fruitcake, giant burger,hamburger, jambalaya, Maine lobster, meatballs, oysters, pulled pork, quesadilla,sweet-potato casserole, tacos, toasted ravioli, Turducken ..