History
Traditionally, eating contests (usually involving pies) were events at county fairs. The recent surge in the popularity of competitive eating is due in large part to televised coverage of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual holiday tradition that has been held on July 4 virtually every year since the 1970s at Coney Island. Recently, this contest has been dominated by IFOCE eater Takeru Kobayashi, who won it consistently from 2001 through 2006; he was dethroned in 2007 by Joey Chestnut. In 2008, Chestnut and Kobayashi tied at 59 hot dogs in 10 minutes (the time span had previously been 12 minutes), and Chestnut won in an eatoff in which he was the first of the two competitors to finish eating 5 hot dogs in overtime, earning Chestnut his second consecutive title. In the 1990s, competitive eating was popular in Japan but is now frowned on by many.
Read more about this topic: Competitive Eaters
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“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)