Last year while browsing at my local Borders bookstore, one new release leaped off the shelf and caught my attention: Eat This Book A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit.

The title and design alone are enough to make anyone take notice – what an odd subject – and though I wouldn’t normally consider myself interested in the topic, I nevertheless found myself interested in this book. A later interview with the author by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show further increased my interest in the work.

Little did I know (it only took me a year to get around to reading it!) that the author, Ryan Nerz – a freelance journalist and emcee of competitive eating events – actually cited me in this text! It’s always fun to find references to me and my work by happenstance, but in a book on competitive eating was the last place that I expected to do so!

A wonderfully written, playful text – at times hilariously disturbing in its vivid detail – Nerz cites me as an example of the intense training and skill required to suppress the gag reflex, and by extension illustrates his own difficulty in pursuing the, um, sport of competitive eating.

I’ll stick to swords – thank you very much – but it’s great to hear that others are learning from my experience as well and are able to extract valuable information which can be applied in their own field.

Also cited in the same chapter is Monsieur Mangetout, a.k.a. Michel Lotito, the man famous for eating an entire Cessna airplane (among many other things) and with whom I was privileged to share screen time during a Discovery Channel program.

Eat This Book is a vivacious chronicle of one man’s journey through the bizarrely American, international sport of competitive eating. Filled with history and personal – er, inside – accounts of the trials and tribulations involved in consuming quantity in record time, it reads like equal parts travelogue, biography and history, with an (un)healthy dose of science and anatomy tossed in. Through it all it remains a fun, easy read that should, curiously, appeal to an incredibly diverse audience.

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Badlands Booker, books, Borders Books, Cessna, Competitive Eating, Crazy Legs Conti, Daily Show, Eat This Book, Eric Booker, gurgitators, IFOCE, International Federation of Competitive Eating, Joey Chestnut, Jon Stewart, Michel Lotito, Monsieur Mangetout, non-fiction, Richard LeFevre, Roderick Russell, Ryan Nerz, Sonya Thomas, sword swallower, sword swallowers, sword swallowing, Takeru Kobayashi