Consider This from NPR - Hot Dog Eating Contests: A Distinctly American Tradition

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

There's nothing obviously patriotic about scarfing down as many hot dogs as you can in ten minutes. So how did competitive eating become so synonymous with the holiday celebrating the Fourth of July?To find out, host Scott Detrow visits a hot dog eating contest in Washington, D.C.And producer Matt Ozug unpacks the evolution of eating as a sport, from a 17th century farmer to today's televised competitions.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. A good 4th of July celebration doesn't just happen. You've got to prepare. Willie's hosting a Fourth of July party, and we're learning techniques because he's going to host another hot dog eating contest at his house.

We're going to have all of us do a hot dog eating contest. I had my tonsils out last September, so there's a lot more space in terms of just, like, airway ability. We recently met Willie Thier in downtown Washington, D.C. at the foot of a big outdoor stage, waiting for a much more serious hot dog eating contest to begin. The final qualifying event for the Super Bowl, Olympics, and World Cup of competitive eating all wrapped up in one bun.

You probably know it, the annual July 4th contest at Nathan's at New York's Coney Island. The one Joey Chestnut has won year after year. Joey hits the 50 mark, still a magic number, even though he blows by it every year, that's still a significant number. In just a few minutes, nine people would take the stage to gorge on as many hot dogs as they could fit in their mouths. The top finishers would punch a ticket to the big event at Nathan's on Tuesday. Thier is excited, his friend Becca Harris,

not quite as pumped. I was just warned to stay out of a splash zone, so I'm backing up a little bit, because I am very apprehensive about how this is gonna go down. Harris has the same question as so many others in the crowd. Why do Americans do this?

I mean, God only knows, right? God only knows. I feel like it's some kind of like inaugural part of their culture at this point, like hot dogs. Consider this. The tradition of eating competitions goes back centuries, but nobody has done it up quite like the U.S. This Independence Day, we dig into the distinctly American tradition of hot dog eating. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Monday, July 3rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a

healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. It's Consider This from NPR. And we're going to go back to that hot dog contest in Washington, where producer Alejandro Marquez-Hanse and I are walking to the back of the stage. Staffers are stacking up plates with five hot dogs a piece. Do you think one of us could stand, like, right in the wings or something to record the actual contest? As long as there's not a medical emergency.

If there's a medical emergency, we'll need you to move right away. Because the EMTs that will be here will need to get up on the stage. Fair. It's almost game time. Master of Ceremonies George Shea, the co-founder of Major League Eating, bounds onto the stage. He's dressed like the monorail salesman from The Simpsons. And he's ready to pump up the crowd. It's time to begin.

Okay, we are underway. Everybody is standing up. Several people are dipping the hot dogs in water, eating the hot dogs, and then eating the buns after the fact. Okay, the guy in the middle is, wow. He's ripping the hot dogs in two, stuffing a half of a hot dog in each mound.

Looks like he's stuffing the bun in after that, kind of jerking up and down as he does it. Early on, it is clear who's going to win. The six foot nine Gideon Oji, who's standing in the middle of the stage stage demolishing three hot dogs at a time. Oji has eaten 20 hot dogs with a little more than five minutes left. He's finishing up that last cup of hot dogs. He's got his fist full of it looks like two hot dogs and buns at this point. He is dunking either end into the cup of

water in front of him. Taking a little pause there to shimmy his shoulders, maybe get loose for the next round of hot dogs. Taking a sip of water, still chewing. Those buns are tricky. Those buns are tricky. In the final minutes, his pace starts to slow, but still five secondsJ.'s final total is 35. He's going back to the big dance at Nathan's for the eighth time. But he's not satisfied. I was shooting for 40 today. I was a little bit winded, so, you know, I just, there wasn't really nobody chasing me, so, you know, I just took it easy.

O.J. is 31 and originally from Nigeria. I came to America in 2008. That's around the time that Joey ate about 65 hot dogs. And I was like, I said, I could do that. That's Joey Chestnut, one of the greatest of all time at this contest. Oji has really embraced this. He's even won a kale eating contest.

I played college basketball at the highest level. You know, this is by far the most challenging thing because you're fighting against your body. Stop doing that to me. You have to keep going for the competition. That's why OG does it. But why is this such a broader thing? Why specifically do Americans do this? And why has competitive eating become so synonymous with the holiday celebrating American independence? To try to answer that question, producer Matt Ozog spoke to some experts who have gone deep

on the subject. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I remember that I spent two years in the 2000s following competitive eating around the country and the world. You know, I saw some things that I can never forget, even if I wanted to. My name is Jason Fagoni, and I'm the author of Horseman of the Esophagus, Competitive Eating, and the Big Fat American Dream. Most people are familiar with the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest. That's the one that's broadcast every year on ESPN, but there's all kinds of other eating contests. For burgers, for cakes, for cannolis.

French fries. Just the craziest kind of wildest, most grotesque, nonsensical, you know, and kind of fun pageants that I'd ever had a chance to witness. One of the most intense experiences of my life was attending the Philadelphia Wing Bowl, the country's premier chicken wing eating contest. 15,000 to 20,000 actual fans packed into a sports arena in Philadelphia at 7 a.m. Then there's this whole other aspect of eating contests in Japan. They come with greatly expanded production values. There are lasers and explosions and dramatic music. There's a lot more ingenuity in the structuring of the contest itself,

whereas in America, the contests tend to be more just about sheer volume. Competitive eating goes back centuries. It's not only an American thing. We have record of a famous competitive eater going back to the 17th century. My name is Eric Grundhauser, and I am a writer and journalist. There was a farmer by the name of Nicholas Wood. Some of the impressive meals that Wood was known to have consumed included eating seven dozen rabbits in one sitting, entire pigs, 12 loaves of bread that had been soaked in ale. He passed out afterwards, but

he made it. Wood earned a number of pretty incredible nicknames, the most exorbitant paunchmonger, Duke Allpaunch, and the Kentish Tenterbelly. Unfortunately, his body was pretty well destroyed from all the eating. He had lost all but one of his teeth after trying to eat an entire mutton shoulder. Wood finally threw in the towel and said, I can't do this any longer. There are a lot of different cultures that have kind of invented eating contests independently at different points in history. And for the first few hundred years after the American Revolution, eating contests were a regular feature at 4th of July celebrations. And then this started to change a little in the 1970s when Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs created a hot dog contest on the 4th of July. You know, the eaters in that era were mostly big guys from Long Island, right? These are like

classic kings of the backyard barbecue. And in the 1990s, these two brothers from New York took over the Nathan's Famous account, George and Richard Shea. And in that age, everyone who was competing in the contest was kind of in on the joke. The Eaters had silly nicknames. There was a guy named Frank Large Della Rosa. Dominic the Dog in Edicado. Ed Cookie Jarvis. Hungry Charles Hardy, Brooklyn, New York.

Eric Badlands Booker. I'm not a quiche, but thirst to my hoskatan and do it in record time. Who is also a rapper and records competitive eating themed rap songs. I have a CD somewhere in my box. And then in 2001, everything changed in an instant when this young Japanese guy named Takeru Kobayashi came to America and competed in the Nathan's Hot Dog contest. Kobayashi was different from everyone who had come before him. He wasn't a big man. He looked very healthy. He didn't have any kind of a jokey nickname, right?

And it turned out that he had been training for the contest as if it were a real sport. Part of Kobayashi's innovation was that he came up with a completely new way to eat the hot dogs. He separated the hot dog from the bun, and then he snapped the hot dogs in half. And then he would snap the bun in half, dunk the bun in water, and eat it. This was an innovation akin to the Fosbury flop in the high jump. The record at that point was 25 hot dogs in 12 minutes, which everybody thought was an enormous quantity. Contest starts, everything is going like normal. And then about three minutes in, but the announcer, they just start looking at Kobayashi with kind of their jaws open. Kobayashi had almost broken the world record, and there was still nine minutes left to go. The kid is incredible. A total beating of the Americans. He was like a conveyor belt. He was just putting them in two at a time.

And then he proceeded to double the world record by the end of the 12 minutes. And then after that, everything changed because there started to be real money. Pretty soon, ESPN was broadcasting the Hot Dog Contest live. What a crowd out here. Americans have all striped their visitors from abroad, celebrating the dream of independence once again on the corner of surf and stillwo. And with that money came a whole new wave of competitors who, you know, like Kobayashi, were training. They were taking it seriously as a sport, and they weren't necessarily in on the joke anymore.

They were really trying to win. Eating is one of the great psychic preoccupations of our species. It's right up there with sex and death. I mean, eating is this animal act that we all participate in to some degree. And this is the most animal version of it. But it's happening in an environment where there are safety rules. So in a sense, it's like this display of gluttony that has been kind of made safe for you to look at and think about. There's like this pain of safety glass between you and the danger.

If you sort of zoom out and you think about, you know, what an eating contest symbolizes more broadly, maybe, it does seem symbolic of the outsized American appetite for everything. Not just for food, but for resources, power, money. You name it, it's kind of a Rorschach test for how people see us. Jason Fagoni is the author of Horseman of the Esophagus. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education,

democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.