As I procrastinate in getting ready to drive to my parents’ house, I’m sorry to admit I have on MTV’s True Life competitive eating episode. I’ve been fascinated/disgusted by competitive eating for years. I remember watching Fox’s Glutton Bowl in abject horror back in 2002. After about five minutes, I grabbed a pad of paper and started taking notes because I was so enraged by Fox. I then published this opinion article in my school’s newspaper, and to my amazement, even got a letter to the editor from a world doughnut eating champion.
Well, if you’ve just been aching to watch overindulgence taken to the extreme, fear not my friends, because another producer of quality programming, Spike TV, will be airing the Turkey Bowl tonight. This is no flag football game, but in the words of the website, it will be a food eating competition where “gastronomic gladiators will pound down food as fast as possible.”
God help us all. After collapsing on the couch in a tryptophan-induced food coma, the last thing I want to do is watch grown men eat more in 10 minutes than my entire family ate for dinner. Can we please just stop with this debacle?