There's an article in the Atlantic Montly about competitive eating, which is gaining popularity in this country as a spectator sport. (For the blissfully ignorant: whoever can eat the most X in Y minutes wins.) I find the whole idea pretty shameful and wish to repent for all the times that I have used food purely as recreation--there are lots of games one can play with youth groups that essentially treat food as toys. Chubby Bunny is the most famous example, although I'm not sure marshmallows really count as food. But it's still not a good idea.

Anyway, I loved this paragraph:

"A lot of people have had trouble," Shea [promoter of competitive eating contests] told me when I asked if it was wise to promote gluttony in one of the fatter nations on earth, "separating this superficial visual of people stuffing their faces with large quantities of food with the stereotype of the Ugly American. That is not where I am. I see beauty, I see poetry."

Poetry, exactly. Shea's eating contests are poetic in their blatancy, their brazen mixture of every American trait that seems to terrify the rest of the planet: our hunger for natural resources that may melt the ice caps and flood Europe, our hunger for cheap thrills that turns Muslim swing voters into car bombers. If anti-American zealots anywhere in the world wanted to perform a minstrel show of our culture, this is what they'd come up with. Competitive eating is a symbolic hairball coughed up by the American id. It is meaningful like a tumor is meaningful. It seems to have a purpose, a message, and its message is this: Look upon our gurgitators, ye Mighty, and despair. Behold these new super-gluttons, these ambassadors of the American appetite, these Horsemen of the Esophagus.

Don't you know that Jason Fagone (the author) pushed back from his computer after writing that and lit a cigarette.

I would add another analogy:
Competitive eating on wheels? is a Hummer.

This has something to do with Maundy Thursday, I just know it...
"You came to redeem us?!? This creation? Really?
Uhh... whatever, dude."