Lapham’s Quarterly on pie eating contests
Lapham’s Quarterly has an article about the history of pie eating contests.
At the same time pie-eating contests were taking place in working-class saloons and between black performers, the events were also popular with men of means as head-to-head matches. After the turn of the twentieth century, “gourmandizing” competitions became the vogue among the wealthy, expanding beyond pie-eating to a new world of competitive consumption. In one 1909 competition at the Fat Men’s Club in Manhattan, the winner ate two hundred and ten oysters, six pounds of steak, nine rolls, ten cups of coffee, and three large pies. Such extravagant consumption was connected to wealth; it was expensive to be fat at the turn of the century. Food costs were high enough that most middle-class Americans couldn’t afford the foods consumed by most Fat Men’s Club members, who weighed two hundred pounds on average. But as cheap food became more readily available by the 1920s, and as ideas about body image changed, the Fat Men’s Clubs died out.
Loading ...