As food challenge season starts, a few thoughts on my last successful attempt.
To think you have a friend in a person midway through attempting a food challenge, is a mistake.
If you are there beside them, cheering encouragement, snapping photographs and slapping them on the back; you are an enemy. Your shared experiences and interests to this point are now irrelevant.
You are a jeering part of the social machination forcing them to actively resist every sensation and instinct the body possesses. You are the next overly textured, flavourless bite he needs to swallow down, suppressing bile to win your laughing approval. For the duration of the challenge, you represent the cost of failure.
The expectant looks, as you begin to realise at one third distance, that you have literally bitten off more than you can chew, isolate the challenger and distance him from his surroundings. You are alone. There is no one who can assist you, and glory will require a compromise of the comfort you are accustomed to. It is similar, although less intense, to the feeling of an impending collision on a motorcycle. Your reaction speed, experience and skill are all you have. There is nothing and no one else who can help.
You resent the brash confidence of the person you were only hours or minutes ago. You feel regret for the large lunch you ate to ‘stretch your stomach’ and for thinking that a self-induced case of the munchies might see you through.
“Is this who I am, am I a fucking clown?” The iPhone’s flash around you like you are artisan food porn destined for Instagram.
You think to the videos of other challenges you watched in awe on YouTube. Joey Jaws downing dogs in Coney Island, Kobayashi narrowly losing his challenge to a Kodiak Bear, Molly Schuyler ravaging that two kilogram steak or wearily swallowing slice upon slice of dripping ghost chilli pizza. You feel a pinch for those who embarrass themselves or risk injury for their pay cheque and the entertainment of others.
Once testaments to the human spirit, you now see them for the dead-eyed circus acts that they are. Bearded ladies and skateboarding torsos trading self-abuse for fleeting moments of glory.
The other challengers are not competitors; they become your family. Your bond tightens as you exchange glances of anxiety and self-defeat across the table. Slowly sipping Coca-Cola in the hope that it might dissolve some of the rapidly accruing matter in your stomach. Finish or forfeit, it doesn’t matter, they know the same feelings you know.
Designed by a marketer and constructed by a sadist, the free meal and t-shirt (the largest size of which is of course too small, you won a food eating contest for fucks sake) become hollow sucker, as you attempt to slip away to the toilet for the inevitable evacuation of your stomach.
The glory rings in your ears as you attune your senses back to the jovial reality and to the group of faces shouting and filming as you soberly added the last bite to your mouth. The war is over. You won. It is time to repair, and to remember your lessons learned.
Photos by Ryan Lewis and Ellie Thorley. Words by Nicholas Green of www.instantgentleman.com.