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The winner of an eating contest demonstrates power: a power of mind over body, of spirit over matter, of will over gag reflex. Nowhere has this been more clearly understood than among the Salish people of the B.C. and Washington coast, where they even have a word for it: tsatlad, or tsatlsqulalitut--eating power.
Powers played an important role in Coast Salish culture. There were many kinds, including, but not limited to, the powers of a shaman, and any adult ought to have one or more. A person with eating power ate normally most of the time. But when challenged or challenging, the same person would eat vast quantities of food without showing the slightest sign of discomfort.
Mainstream Western culture knows two kinds of eating contest: formal and informal. Formal contests divide again into two: the folk events, like the Silver Crik Festival Banana Split Eating contest in Garrettsville, Ohio, and the professional leagues, best exemplified by the people who show up in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Champion of cockles and ice cream
Until 1990, when Guinness dropped its gluttony category, this was the place to look for the feats of professional eaters. The most accomplished record setter was Englishman Peter Dowdeswell who, as of 1986, held 279 world eating records, including: a pound of cheddar cheese in 1 minute, 13 seconds; 13 raw eggs in 1 second; 38 soft-boiled eggs in 75 seconds; 3 pounds of shrimp in 3 minutes, 10 seconds; 2 pounds of strawberries in 12.95 seconds; 3 pounds of potatoes in 1 minute, 22 seconds; 5 pounds, 123/4 ounces of sausage meat in 4 minutes, 29 seconds. Dowdeswell's wife held the women's ale-drinking record. His son Tony was world cockle-eating champion and world ice-cream eating champion, and a son-in-law had scarfed down 3 pounds, 12 ounces of chicken in 12 minutes, 37 seconds, to become world king of chicken-eating.
The biggest puzzle for me is why Guinness would group these feats under the heading "gluttony." I thought gluttons were supposed to enjoy themselves. In fact, I thought the whole point of gluttony, the reason it's one of the seven deadly sins and not just something you can take or leave, is that it's enjoyable. Where is the pleasure in downing 13 slimy raw eggs in one gulp?
Very few of us are inclined, like Donna Maiello, to eat 100 yards of spaghetti in 27.75 seconds, and even fewer make sure that there's someone standing by with a stopwatch. But we are all familiar with informal eating contests, and even more familiar with times when people who eat normally most of the year stuff themselves at enormous ritual dinners.
The incredible human belly
The human stomach can expand. It has folds in it that flatten out as the food inside presses against the stomach walls. This is a lucky thing, too, because for thousands of years, our bodies were the only food-storage containers we had. Even after we took up agriculture, and built storehouses for grain, there were fat and lean times of the year. Some German country inns still put on a slaughter festival menu in the fall--a remnant of the days when animals that could not be fed over the winter were slaughtered when the weather turned cold. In Christian Europe, the slaughter was the beginning of the feasting season, which lasted until Lent--the fasting season--which ended with spring chicken and lamb and the first edible greens.
The ability to go beyond the normal limits of the stomach rouses the temptation to see just how far beyond we can go. So small boys try to break their own pancake-eating records, egged on by this logic: the more you can eat, the bigger you are. Add an opponent to the breakfast table, and you've found a way to discover which boy is the bigger boy.
Jay Jacobs, a former New York restaurant critic for Gourmet magazine, tells the story of two such eating contests in his book, A Glutton for Punishment: Confessions of a Mercenary Eater. In the first, Jacobs and a M. du Bellon, his neighbour in the small Provençal town where Jacobs and his wife lived, engage in combat over who can eat the most snails. Jacobs reels away in defeat after they've each eaten 11 dozen.
Then another neighbour, a M. Orgeas, throws down a more subtle gauntlet, a dinner invitation. "Even before the first course was served, it was obvious that M. Orgeas had every intention of taking my measure," Jacobs writes. "I knew I was engaged in another mano a mano, like it or not, and scrupulously kept pace with him." The meal Jacobs consumes is: a huge appetizer course of cold meat, a whole chicken apiece, roast beef, a ragout of meatballs, vegetables, salad, floating islands, and cheese--and bread and wine with all of the above, of course. Driven to hallucinations by this excess, Jacobs goes home to sleep it off, and then hides out for a few days "mortified by my gastronomic trouncing chez Orgeas."
How the Coast Salish squared off
Coast Salish eating contests were as personal as the ones Jacobs entered. The difference is that only one person or one team ate, and it was always the guests. The object was, literally, to eat the host out of house and home. Drop by my house at the right time, and this could take less than 15 minutes - which was of course, the point. The eater's boast: "My power can consume everything you own." The host's implicit reply: "I am so rich, I have so much food, that I can feed your eating power until it can't eat any more"--which is a serious malfunction in an eating power.
"All of a man's property and his wives and children might be forfeit if he lost in such a situation," writes Marian Wesley Smith, in her 1940 ethnographic study The Puyallup-Nisqually. Smith notes that it was not just the amount of food eaten that was extraordinary, but the style with which it was eaten: "After consuming the food and while eating, the person showed no extra puffiness nor bunches on his body or under his clothes."
So when three old men came to challenge one of Smith's informants at a feast, they talked and joked among themselves as they ate four entire meals apiece. They stopped short when he still had a half a side of beef left, and blamed their defeat on the watermelon he'd served for dessert. Too much water. Three years later, they came back for a return match. After an entire yearling steer, potatoes, rice, beans, bread, and fruit, they conceded defeat. There is no record of what, if anything, they lost.
Then there's the story of the old man who, in his youth, had boasted of his eating power around some white settlers. When challenged, he sat down and ate two sides of beef--a cow, in other words--and washed it down with a barrel of water. "They were satisfied," Smith's informant says.
I would have been more nervous than satisfied watching a man of normal size eat a cow--calmly, chewing well as he went, possibly making jokes and taking side bets, showing no signs of discomfort. The barrel of water I can accept, somehow. But where did the cow go? The Puyallup-Nisqually people who talked to Smith in the 1930s would have said that the man's power ate the cow. That's at least as reasonable as the idea that it all fit in his stomach. Of course, physics tells us that the cow and the man are both just collections of atoms, which is to say tiny bits of matter and a whole lot of empty space.
Maybe Coast Salish power eaters knew some way to restructure the food so it became immensely compact. Maybe not. But if a cow disappears into a man, and the man does not blow up, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, then I, for one, would like an explanation. If it isn't the stomach, what gives?
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This is excerpted from Eating My Words, a collection of essays on food and culture by Vancouver writer Eve Johnson and available from Whitecap Books. ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png)
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