1. New York, NY. Valhalla. Not only the headquarters of the
International Federation of Competitive Eating (Chelsea) and the site of
the eating world's most prestigious contest (Fourth of July hot dogs on Coney Island), but also the Big Man's home turf. You've got civil servants Eric "Badlands" Booker and "Hungry" Charles Hardy, day-trader Tim "Eater X" Janus, plus past Nathan's champs and borough guys like the hirsute Jay Green, Ed Krachie of Maspeth, Frank "Large" Dellarosa of Queens. ("Large." The best eating nickname ever.) Extending New York out to Long Island pulls in Don "Moses" Lerman, Arnie "Chowhound" Chapman, and Ed "Cookie" Jarvis.
2. Tokyo, Japan. Nobuyuki "The Giant" Shirota lives here. Conventional wisdom has it that six-time hot dog champion Takeru Kobayashi is the world's greatest eater, but Kobayashi has been beaten by Shirota three times in major televised Japanese contests. ("Food Battle Club," the show was called. Picture "Iron Chef" except with eating instead of cooking.) I met Shirota in early 2005. I could not stop looking at him. Looking at him was like looking at one of those optical illusions of people standing in specially constructed rooms designed to screw with your sense of scale. I mean, look at this picture.
His head. The picture really doesn't do it justice. Shirota can fit an entire onigiri (rice ball) into his mouth, and an entire normal-sized coffee mug, and can fit any lollipop vertically between his lips.
3. Philadelphia, Pa., host of the Wing Bowl chicken-wing contest/knucklehead freakout. Do a flickr search and you'll see. Fun fact about Wing Bowl: it's a guilty pleasure of some pretty heavy politicos. This guy gets tickets every year. This guy was snuck in via a back door so as not to attract attention. This guy loved it so much he volunteered to present a miniature Liberty Bell statuette to the winner.
4. Las Vegas, NV. Thanks to its buffets, a growth medium for pro eaters, a vast arid Petri dish. Home of the "First Couple" of competitive eating (Rich and Carlene LeFevre) and site of horrendous televised fiascoes such as the Alka-Seltzer U.S. Open of Competitive Eating" (2005, ESPN, not renewed for 2006 due to Alka-Seltzer's corporate parent's apparent embarrassment and fear of a consumer backlash) and the tackier but far more entertaining "Battle of the Buffets" (2003, The Travel Channel).
5. Chattanooga, Tenn. The pro-eating circuit's most lucrative event, the Krystal Square-Off, holds its finals here. A Krystal burger is a square burger about the size of a White Castle slider. Locals call them "gutbombers" or "gutblasters." (It's a love/hate kind of thing: people know, on a rational level, that the burgers are vile, but Krystal is pervasive, a component of the local identity, and a lot of people seem to have had their sense memories hijacked at some key vulnerable point in childhood, so there's a lot of nostalgia about these gutbombers.) Tennessee is also noteworthy because it can claim Al Gore Jr., who wrote a newspaper story about a Whopper-eating contest at a Tennessee Burger King back when Gore was a cub reporter at the Tennessean. He subsequently moved on to more boring issues, such as saving the planet.
6. Cleveland, Ohio. In recent years, Fox 8's slapsticky and beloved program The Big Chuck and 'Lil John Show ? a forerunner of which was hosted by Ghoulardi, aka Ernie Anderson, who is the father of filmmaker P.T. Anderson ? has revived its long-dormant "Pizza Fight" segment. Locals tune in on Saturday nights to watch 'Lil John Rinaldi, a midget, introduce the champion, David "Coondog" O'Karma. Coondog then eats a 9-inch pizza in 25 seconds.
7. Morioka, Japan. Home of the original WONKOSOBA restaurant and the famous soba-noodle game. David "Coondog" O'Karma and I made a pilgrimage here on our trip to Japan. Our waitress seated us. We had called ahead and told them we wanted to play the soba-noodle game, and they were ready. The waitress disappeared and came back with a helper who carried a tall stack of trays. On the trays were neat rows of lacquer bowls, each bowl holding a 20-gram fillip of soba. The waitress gave each of us a personal bowl and a set of chopsticks. She lifted two bowls from a tray and told us to tell her when we were ready. We looked at each other, grinned, and said go. Okay. The waitress poured the two bowls of soba into our personal bowls. Ganbarre, I believe she said. Have courage. We dipped in with our chopsticks and slurped the soba. As soon as we finished, she poured more soba into our bowls. The gap between shots of soba was like 2 seconds for me, half that for Dave. I started giggling but then I sobered up and the three of us fell into a groove. Dave told me later how much he liked the sounds of the clicking lacquer bowls, an industrious sound, quite pretty. Ganbarre, ganbarre! Final tally was Dave 180-something, me 107 or 109. I will have to check the exact number on the little wooden plaque that the WONKOSOBA people were nice enough to give me and that's now hanging in my kitchen. (I'm at the beach today.) Top soba-noode-game players score in the 400- to 500-bowl range. Hot dog champion Takeru Kobayashi once ate 387 bowls in 12 minutes, more than 20 pounds of food.
8. New Orleans, La., long the capital of laid-back civic indulgence. Consecrated, in 2005, by Sonya Thomas's 46-dozen-oyster performance at the ACME Oyster House championship.
9. Martin County, N.C., because its residents elected a Moon Pie-eating champion named C. Mort Hurst as their chairman of the board of commissioners.