Worry about athletic injuries? So do the world's biggest eaters. Freakish champion Takeru Kobayashi has contracted an arthritic jaw. Slate has this very interesting article by Jason Fagone on the history and future of the injuries of competitive eating, with perspectives of thought that I find unusual.
The apparent frivolity of competitive eating has always colored our response to its bad health outcomes. An eating injury or death has never seemed tragic or heroic, just … sad. Kobayashi's injury ought to change that. It deserves to move competitive eating past the joke/jeremiad dichotomy and into the framework of actual sport—with all of sport's narrative dignity, its metaphorical richness, and, most importantly, its empathy for the human bodies it churns through and spits out.
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