The disgusting sport of competitive eating

A foray into American competitive eating - Insatianble by Jason Fagone

The first thing to say about ‘Insatiable’ is that it is a full-length book about the sport - or, if you prefer, the disgusting practice - of competitive eating. I wasn't sure if I wanted to read 300 pages about an activity known as 'gurgitating'.

The second thing is that the author, Jason Fagone, is absolutely superb. In many ways, he's like the young Tom Wolfe - he wants to take you somewhere you wouldn't normally go, and then, somehow, with tremendous verve, use it to explain the state of the world. He succeeds brilliantly.

At the start, the author appears to be going through the same agonies as the reader. Why spend time thinking about people who spend their lives regularly eating against the clock? 'Competitive eating', writes Fagone, 'was a symbolic hairball coughed up by the American id. It was meaningful like a tumour was meaningful.'

In other words, horrible though it is, competitive eating is worth writing about, as a sign of the worst aspects of human nature. It might be 'a canary in the coalmine' - a warning sign. Its competitors are 'horsemen of the oesophagus'.

Fagone sets out to meet the competitors. He wants to see what motivates them, and what the texture of their everyday lives is like. And there are fascinating questions to be asked. Why are some competitive eaters, such as Bill 'El Wingador' Simmons, the chicken-wing champion, fat, while others, like the extraordinary Japanese hot-dog eater Takeru Kobayashi, slim? Kobayashi is a medical mystery. He's a skinny little guy, but he can eat 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes.

Fifty hot dogs, complete with buns, stuffed down in 12 minutes is, in an alimentary sense, right at the edge of human capability. Fagone consults gastric specialists. He takes 50 hot dogs and buns, breaks them up, soaks them in water, and discovers that the resultant mush has approximately the same volume as a basketball. What is Kobayashi's secret? It's a question that takes Fagone all the way to Japan.

And he's always animated by the same question: is competitive eating a disgusting, base occupation or is it, somehow, glorious? When people write about it, he tells us, they do so in brief, punning reports, which 'fail to capture the mad, galumphing experience of an eating contest, a really good one, when the crowd's into it, gawking, screaming, and the food's detonated on contact with a merciless line of teeth and jaws'. Somehow, eating contests get people going in a primal way. Somehow, they are more than just prankish entertainment.

And when he begins to get involved with the competitors, he finds something extraordinary - amazing characters, thwarted geniuses, showmen suffering for their art. They are mostly men, mostly overweight, sometimes with health problems - gut trouble, heartburn anxiety, borderline diabetes. Like comedians, they are often secretly miserable, but driven by the need to perform. 'What am I doing this for?' says Ed 'Cookie' Jarvis. 'I'm basically putting 11,000 calories into my body with the chance I could get hurt. What for? There's gotta be a cause.'

Fagone gets to know David 'Coondog' O'Karma, a pizza and hot-dog eater, and finds a wannabe poet in the throes of a mid-life crisis. O'Karma paints and decorates for a living, and sees competitive eating as his last chance for fame and glory. 'I'm not ready to become invisible,' he says. 'As Coondog, I'm visible. As a painter, I'm just nothin'.'

More poignant still is the world of Bill Simmons, 'El Wingador', a heavy Philadelphian truck driver, and sometime champion of Philadelphia's 'Wing Bowl' competition, in which eaters compete to eat chicken wings against the clock. Simmons, as Fagone points out, has mastered the art of speed-eating chicken wings. If you like, he's as good at eating chicken wings as Beckham is at kicking a dead ball.

'If the meat is sitting just right,' says Fagone, 'a talented eater like Wingador can strip a blade with a single aggressive bite-and-pull motion, clamping down on the bone and bringing the full weight of the jaw to bear.' While he's eating, he sings a song to himself - always Pearl Jam's Jeremy. Listening to El Wingador eat is like hearing 'the sound of earthworms writhing in a bait bucket'.

But Fagone pulls off a wonderful feat - he makes you care about competitive eating. He takes you into the lives of these people, with their techniques of chewing and swallowing, and gets past the eating to the emotions. I found myself hoping against hope that El Wingador would come out of retirement for one last blowout. I felt genuinely sad at the death, possibly eating-related, of Fino Cachola. I was engrossed by Fagone's culinary history of immigration - he sees a link between poor immigrants and their competitive-eating descendants.

In the end, the reason why eating contests are fascinating, Fagone believes, is that they are the ultimate underdog sport. As he points out, 'each contest is an underdog story'. And every contestant is an underdog. As El Wingador puts it with bravura self-loathing: 'Even when I win, I feel like s---.'