Eats

I come from a family of heavy eaters. We can eat a ton of food and luckily, not much will happen to our bodies. I let mine go a little bit, but I'm swimming again and melting off the weight, though I digress. This is just a couple stories about some foods.

I had a large appetite, even when I was a little kid. One night, I was being babysat by an old family friend. He was fourteen or fifteen at the time and regularly played football for his school. I was just a punkass kid. It was around dinner time and we were both really hungry. I don't know whose idea it was, but we decided on a hot dog eating contest.

My mom had bought a large package of hot dogs, it had thirty two in the pack and we decided to make the whole entire pack. Boiled it up, threw them in buns, and took out the ketchup. We sat down at the table and divided up the hot dogs between us and began.

It was not a timed event, it was primarily just to see who could eat more. So we began. Slowly, one by one, the hot dogs disappeared. A couple of them had ketchup, a couple of them had soggy buns, but whatever, we chomped them down. Oddly enough, I was able to keep up with him dog for dog.

As time went on, we both slowed our eating, but we still chewed on, filling ourselves with the tubular meats. It got down to our last dogs, and he couldn't believe that I had eaten so many hot dogs. Weirdly, I thought the same about him. It was fifteen to fifteen, and we were both struggling to eat the last dog. He finished his dog before mine, so he technically won, but I finished my last hot dog not too long after. He said it was one of the most impressive feats he's ever seen a little kid do. I was fucking proud of myself.



Then came a day about a year ago when I was still in school. I was going to a technical school for various trades. I had signed up for Culinary Arts, but there were quite a few different classes to sign up for like Biotechnology, Automotive Repair, Business Management and a few others.

It was a tradition at that school to have a day called 'Weenie Day' every year at the end of the year. It was officially called 'Student Appreciation Day', but they Weenie Day sounds so much better. This is a day where the school holds a bunch of events and each cluster of classes creates teams to compete against each other. The one who wins the most events is awarded the prestigious Bronze Weenie Statue.

Beforehand, they give out awards to all of the people in each of the classes. It was quite tedious, but all in all, it would just show a picture of someone, say that they passed all their classes, and go onto the next kid. Every now and then, a kid that was popular would be shown and some people would cheer or give some congratulations.

I only tell this to give an idea of how close everyone in my class was. To show some kind of team spirit, we all made tye-dye T-shirts, and wore them down. When it got time to show off our own, on every picture it plastered on the projection screen, we made such a large ruckus, our entire class got in trouble. It was worth it.

So then came time to participate in the events. I signed up for the hot dog contest. Many people were skeptical in my eating abilities. They had wanted someone like one of the fatter kids to do it, but just because they were bigger, that didn't mean they could eat more or eat faster. I know what I was doing, and I successfully signed up.

I got trash talked by the other people who were representing their teams. They claimed they were going to out eat me, but I knew better. I wasn't over confident, but I was definitely fearless going into it. The challenge was ten hot dogs, three minutes, no hands. Six way battle.

A large crowd gathered around the long table where the contestants and I had sat down, looking down at our cylindrical meats. People were looking down at us, and I could hear people even taking bets as to who was going to win. There was a girl there, and people were making sexual comments, to nobody's surprise. I heard most of the people placing bets down on the guy next to me. He was a track and field star, a wrestler, played football, and even got a little high specifically to get the munchies.

It was tense. Silent. Then the go ahead was given and it started. Diving down into my plate, I voraciously tore into my hot dogs. No longer the sloppy eight year old I once was, I inhaled my food. People were shocked at how fast I ate, especially when I got down my pace. People started chanting my name. It was an odd feeling of pride.

At roughly two and a half minutes, I was done. My dogs were all gone, my stomach only half full. I looked up, negativity crept in and I thought maybe one of the other teams had already finished. I was dead wrong, the others were only about half done. The girl though was three fourths done. When the clock whined down, I was declared the prominent victor and my team cheered in glory, hell, even some of the other teams cheered in unexpected praise, and the girl came in second.

That day, my class won just about every event we played except for one. It was a great day. A fun day.

Last short story. This summer, my family from Hawaii came up to see me graduate high school and just visit in general. We went up to somewhere to eat, I think it might have been a Denny's. My relatives are, while far from rich, are far from broke. As we sat down to look at the menu, I was very hesitant on what to order. Seeing my looks, my grandma told me I could get whatever I wanted since we were not going to get anything else that day.

I took her up on that.

I ordered three pancakes, some crepes, three pieces of bacon, two pieces of sausage, a four egg omelet, toast, orange juice, milk, and hash browns. As the food came, my uncles who sat next to me were amazed at the food I ordered, but they figured I would be taking some of it in a box and complimented me on thinking ahead to take food with me. That was only because they didn't know my cavernous stomach.

As I ate, they just looked on, shocked that I could put it all away and not look like a total slob or be completely out of shape. I shoved more and more down into my gullet. I ate everything, but I was soon coming to a block as a little bit of pancake remained.

I was going to tap out, I figured I might not have been as hungry as I had originally thought. Maybe I had almost literally bitten off more than I could chew. When defeat seemed to settle down into my eyes, my uncle looked at me very seriously.

"Listen. You can eat this. The pain you're feeling, you'll only feel it now. The pride and honor from finish though, that...that is forever."

Feeling a renewed vigor, I gulped down a drink of milk and devoured the rest of the pancakes. They were flabbergasted by my ability to eat. It was a filling breakfast. I regretted nothing.