I first heard of Takeru Kobayashi several years ago in a Giant Robot magazine article about the young Japanese man’s dominance of the competitive eating world. Some people consider it a sport, and if you’ve ever had the stomach-churning pleasure of watching Kobayashi put away a record-breaking 53 and 1/2 hot dogs in 12 minutes, buns and all, you’d have little doubt that he’s the Michael Jordan/Tiger Woods/Lance Armstrong of competitive eating. Last July I watched ESPN’s Alka-Seltzer US Open of Competitive Eating and was rapt by his hot-dog splitting, bun-soaking, stomach-shaking, double-fisted hoovering technique. An industrial-strength wet vac has nothing on him, folks. He smoked the competition by consuming a mere 49 hot dogs in 12 minutes, winning his fifth straight title. And the guy is a lean, muscular 170-some pounds, half the size of some of the other big guns.

A couple of books have been published recently about competitive eating: Ryan Nerz’s Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit and Jason Fagone’s Horsemen of the Esophagus. The former emceed a handful of eating contests in 2005 and, uh, regurgitates his experiences in the book. (This is next on my reading list. Seriously.)

Some of the delectable items people devour in competitions are your standard county fair foods like pies, corn, and chili, and run to the exotic such as deep-fried asparagus and cow brains. I’ve come up with a list of everyday foods I would not want to be forced to eat as much of in a short period of time:

- butter
- hard-boiled eggs
- mayonnaise

all of which appear on the International Federation of Competitive Eating’s list of competitively-eaten foods.

And here’s a factoid you can share at your next dinner party: the official term used for vomiting during competition is reversal of fortune. Indeed, if you have the chance of winning $5000 in ten minutes and all you have to do is eat. Simple enough, right?