History
Traditionally, eating contests (usually involving pies) were events at county fairs. The recent surge in the popularity of competitive eating is due in large part to televised coverage of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual holiday tradition that has been held on July 4 virtually every year since the 1970s at Coney Island. Recently, this contest has been dominated by IFOCE eater Takeru Kobayashi, who won it consistently from 2001 through 2006; he was dethroned in 2007 by Joey Chestnut. In 2008, Chestnut and Kobayashi tied at 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes (the time span had previously been 12 minutes), and Chestnut won in an eatoff in which he was the first of the two competitors to finish eating 5 hot dogs in overtime, earning Chestnut his second consecutive title. In the 1990s, competitive eating was popular in Japan but is now frowned on by many.
Read more about this topic: Competitive Eating
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)