Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd.
At the time, the “amateur” world of competitive eating—encompassing small holiday events and local restaurant challenges—looked like a way to recapture a sporting life I’d lost, a means of once again reliving the fast-twitch tension of a stolen base, the chest-clattering thunder of a hardwood shuttle run. But food competitions didn’t help wrest back control. If anything, competitive eating became just another way to fold in on myself like a piece of dough, to reframe the consumptive appetites that led to fights, a DWI, and stints of flunking out of college. I was no good to anybody during this episodic decade and a half, but with its trophies and cheering crowds, competitive eating appeared on the horizon like a totem to noble excess, an opportunity to offer up my worst impulses as a virtue-seeking endeavor.
I had grown up on canned food, the kind of peas and green beans that basically disintegrate when you bite into them, and the closest I ever got to a home-cooked meal was my father’s valiant attempt at baked salmon, a smell I still recoil at today. On my mother’s side, we were hyperreligious, the type of churchgoing stalwarts who deny pleasure as a means of penitence. Even though we liked to eat and drink, we denied these feelings and hid them in shame. My mother was the most accomplished at this. The energetic, two-jobbed divorcée could subsist on almost nothing at all, then revel in a banquet of booze, cigarettes, and chili cheese Fritos. Somewhere along the line, I learned this lesson as well: how a person could temporarily stop listening to their body and its pangs of need. I could go days and barely eat, then summon the strength to throw my bones against a wall for a coach’s approval.
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