Squandrous

Eating hot dogs on Coney Island.

Today, on American McCarver:

So Joey Chestnut has once again been crowned Repulsive Gorging Champion of the World, in a contest that fully 81% of ESPN viewers don’t even consider a sport. Let pass that there’s actually an organization called “Major League Eating.” Let pass the spectacle of men rhythmically stuffing their gullets with soaked hotdogs. Let pass, well, pretty much everything about the event. None of it matters in the face of a single, strident fact:

It’s terrible TV.

The whole reason that the contest exists — or, rather, than it’;s anything other than a half-column-inch curiosity in tomorrow’s paper — is to fill an hour of airtime. And it does a terrible job of it. The eating only lasts for ten minutes, and that’s nauseating to watch. There’s no balletic beauty, no elegant effort. There are just a bunch of guys — some in mohawks and in facepaint — stuffing themselves.

The whole idea of competitive eating is fascinatingly frightening to me. Frightening because the glamorization of conspicuously-wasteful gluttony sickens me both viscerally and conceptually. Fascinating because people spend lots of time and money training for this, while other people spend lots of money and time watching this — and I can’t understand either group, as hard as I try.

(Source: americanmccarver)