Originally published on the website Sugar Savvy in February, 2006.

As I circled for a parking space near the Chicago Chocolate Company last Monday, I noticed that an ambulance and a local news truck were already occupying the prime spots right in front of the building. “What the hell am I doing with my life?” I wondered, narrowly dodging delivery vans departing from the butcher shop across the street. “When did I become the kind of person that has enough free time to attend a chocolate eating contest at eleven o’clock on a Monday morning? Check that. When did I become the kind of person that deliberately rearranges her schedule – a schedule that was, ironically enough, filled with career counseling appointments – to witness a chocolate eating contest? I’m not a woman, I’m a child.”

Eventually I found a spot and made my way inside the store. Before long I’d managed to wedge myself into the corner of a small, crowded conference room, and watched reporters and cameramen on assignments for practically every major media outlet in the city jockeying for position. Off in another corner awaiting introductions were the hopeful (and hopefully hungry) contestants of the GoldenPalace.net St. Valentine’s Day Chocolate Massacre, a chocolate eating contest sponsored by the International Federation of Competitive Eating.

“Where did all the real news go?” I mused, looking around at the cluster of boom mics, tape recorders and telephoto lenses. “Why aren’t these people busy producing solemn reports on gang shooting sprees and corrupt aldermen diverting taxpayers’ toll money into their silk-lined pockets? Why are they here with me, clearly a gigantic loser, to film a bunch of people stuffing their faces with chocolate? Has Chicago gone soft?”

Before I had time to explore this line of inquiry any further, a jocular announcer sporting an old-fashioned straw boater hat began introducing the candidates. As the names were called, they took their places behind folding tables loaded with large heart-shaped chocolates and huge cups of hot water, pumping their fists in response to the cheers of an admittedly tiny crowd. Minus the media presence, there were probably only about twenty onlookers.

The contest was scheduled to be seven minutes long, in honor of the seven guys murdered by Al Capone’s men in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929. I had assumed that all the eaters would be big, burly motorcycle dudes, but this was not the case. True, there was only one (teeny, tiny) woman competing, but the men came in all shapes and sizes. They hunched over their piles of chocolate, waiting to make their first grab after the contest began. And suddenly, they were off!

I had never seen a live eating competition before. Sure, we’ve all seen that tiny Japanese guy Kobayashi stuffing nauseating quantities of hot dogs down his throat on cable, but it’s different when you’re four feet away, when you can actually smell the chocolate as it starts melting down the chins and beards of the competitors right in front of you. And you know what? When you’re watching people straining to ingest sickening quantities of chocolate hearts, seven minutes starts to feel like an eternity. Honestly, the whole thing was kinda gross.

As I stared, repulsed and fascinated, I realized that each person was demonstrating their own unique style of getting the chocolate into their guts as quickly as possible. Some listened meditatively to their iPods, some rocked back and forth, and others bounced up and down. They all took frequent sips of hot water to help the chocolate melt and slide more easily. Beads of sweat began to appear on furrowed brows.

I had assumed that the contest would be filled with noisy slurping and burping, but actually the whole production was pretty quiet. Sure, one guy’s occasional tendency to grunt and groan was unpleasant (I guess he’s the Monica Seles of the competitive eating circuit), but the strategies employed by most of the eaters mainly just reminded me of watching one of those nature shows where they film an anaconda swallowing, say, an entire pig. The movements were small and slow, but the results were grand.

The winner was Patrick Bertoletti, a local culinary student sporting a greased-up fauxhawk. I stood next to his family while the results were being announced, and in case you’re wondering, they were totally normal. His mom couldn’t decide how to respond to her son’s victory; her reaction seemed stuck somewhere between bemusement and pride.

“So does he eat anything else in such large quantities?” I asked them.

“Oh sure, he does lots of stuff. Corned beef sandwiches, pizzas, whatever,” replied his incredibly slim twin sister.

“You must be very proud,” I managed to respond, before the news crews swarmed them for celebratory sound bites.

Patrick won $2500 for eating just shy of two pounds of chocolate. He seemed relatively calm about the whole thing, comfortable in his abilities and proud of his achievements. In other words, a graceful winner. But I'm afraid I was not a graceful spectator. The sweet, oily scent of melting chocolate hung heavily in the crowd. After spending most of the contest with my hand clamped over my mouth, moaning softly, I realized that the whole spectacle had left me feeling queasy. I headed outside, and breathed deeply into the wind as it wound its way through a Chicago whose only media-worthy massacre that morning involved one young man and two pounds of chocolate hearts.

Categories: Essay
March 01, 2006