“It’s Against Everything I Stand For.”

Posted By elissa on Feb 13, 2012 | 1 comment

The title of this post is a quote from superstar chef Alice Waters. I pulled it from a recent “Op-Doc” in the New York Times, “El Wingador,” created by independent filmmaker Errol Morris. Here’s the context:

I have been fascinated by champion eaters for over 30 years.

When I was in Berkeley, Calif., in the 1970s I made a pilgrimage to Oakland to visit Eddie Miller, known as Bozo, the world champion chicken-eater. Bozo was in the Guinness World Records book for eating 27 two-pound roast chickens in one sitting. A remarkable feat of gluttony. I remember trying to tell my friend Alice Waters about Bozo, and she clamped her hands over her ears and said, “I just can’t listen to this kind of thing. It’s against everything I stand for.”

Remarkable???

Ms. Waters speaks for me! As I noted back in 2008:

Eating contests have – of course – been around for ages as a form of entertainment, like at county fairs and such. But that you would actually have a formal organization, with “stars” and “fans” – and rankings and statistics and what not takes it to a whole new level of strangeness. As a culture, we’re already too obsessed with food, especially bad food…this is just one more manifestation of that. It’s one more degree of separation between food/eating and human health/nutrition…which isn’t psychologically healthy, either.

The video Morris posted at the NYT really brings that last sentence home. It features Bill Simmons, aka “El Wingador” – who won the Philadelphia Wing Bowl 5 times. At one point, Simmons actually describes his competitive eating (~2:42 in) as an eating disorder – a description that aptly sums the whole “sport” up, IMHO.

Sorry about that. It made me wince, too.

It’s rather ironic that Morris references Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” in his Times article. The story’s protagonist is a professional faster, whose career comes to an end when the public no longer finds the sight of starvation entertaining:

For meanwhile the aforementioned change in public interest had set in; it seemed to happen almost overnight; there may have been profound causes for it, but who was going to bother about that; at any rate the pampered hunger artist suddenly found himself deserted on fine day by the amusement-seekers, who went streaming past him to other more-favored attractions. For the last time the impresario hurried him over half Europe to discover whether the old interest might still survive here and there; all in vain; everywhere, as if by secret agreement, a positive revulsion from professional fasting was in evidence.

Although it’s not the parallel that Morris intended to draw, I wouldn’t be sorry to see competitive eating undergo a similar “change in the public interest.” Ugh.