The Hunger Games IV: Extreme Satiation
A dive into the YouTube phenomenon of extreme eating
There is a lot of incredibly weird shit on YouTube. You probably know that. But some of the particularly weird shit I’ve been looking into recently is the “extreme eating” community. These are people who make it their thing to eat very large amounts of frequently gross and occasionally inedible substances in a short amount of time for the entertainment of their fans. There’s a shockingly large community of these people who spend time trying to one-up each other with how big a fool they can make themselves seem. With the knowledge that I’m writing about this soon after our friend Dave blended a meat pie into a donut on this blog, here are some of the biggest names in this carnival of foolishness
Furious Pete
Furious Pete is probably the most accomplished of YouTube’s extreme eaters. Purportedly he used to be an anorexic, and bounced back from it in the most absurd possible way – by eating plates of food designed for six people in under three minutes:
Though Furious Pete has had some truly impressive eating “achievements,” where he really shines is his form. Pete takes to his meals like what I can only describe as a hungry hungry hippo, frantically (furiously?) face-charging his food as though he’s trying to devour it and knock it unconscious at the same time. He won’t pause to savour anything, because enjoying your meal is for chumps with less than 800,000 subscribers.
How does he retain his muscular physique while consuming enough calories to give a man seven simultaneous heart attacks? Apparently he eats so much so fast that his body doesn’t have time to digest it, so sometimes he just poops entire food items. No word on whether he eats them a second time, but I’d like to suggest it would be wasteful if he didn’t.
Matt Stonie
Remember that story that went viral recently of that snake that ate a crocodile? They can do that because they can eat like 40 times their own body weight or something stupid. You know what else can do that? This unbelievable fucker:
Matt Stonie is a scrawny little Asian guy who literally defies physics on a regular basis. How it is that he can fit portions of food heavier than his entire body inside himself without both his eyeballs popping out like champagne corks is anybody’s guess.
All I’m saying is, if you have this guy around for pizza, you might want to make sure you don’t split the bill evenly.
L.A. Beast
The L.A. Beast is the dudebro of the extreme eating circuit, with his cap on backward and a face so punchable it’s as though Ryan Reynolds and Shia LeBeouf had a man baby. What’s fascinating about the L.A. Beast is that he’s just not very good at it, so you’re not really watching a feat of extreme eating so much as you’re watching a guy shovel garbage into his mouth while he complains about it and then, more often than not, cries, throws up and asks to be taken to the hospital:
The Beast’s specialty isn’t necessarily eating large amounts of food, just really stupid food that he knows he can’t handle, like entire fist-sized lumps of wasabi, or that time he ate a whole bag of those Haribo gummi bears that are supposed to give you explosive diarrhea.
Or hey, ever wanted to watch a guy eat a cactus? The Beast wasn’t having any of that bullshit. That’s why he ate two cacti instead
Of course the highlight of his career was when his dad told him that if he didn’t get a job or at least stop vomiting all over the floor every day, he’d kick him out of the house. The Beast responded by deliberately vomiting all over the inside of his dad’s car like the mature man that he is. We’re sure they had a good laugh about it together later.
Shoenice
Shoenice is the dark horse of the extreme eating crowd, the Sith Lord of whom nobody will speak his name. Suffering from an obvious case of brain damage from all the drugs he takes, or all the crap he swallows, or more likely a combination of the two, Shoenice is barely capable of coherent speech. But he is capable of swallowing a whole tube of painter’s caulk:
It’s not enough that Shoenice is basically a human garbage truck, but he gets away with eating things that are literal poison. I once ate a chocolate bar that I found under the computer desk and I had to go lie down for two days. Shoenice eats a bottle of shampoo and doesn’t even blink.
It’s likely that he owes his intestinal fortitude to a galvinised liver after years of over-drinking that would make an Irishman weep, and that’s how he can slam a bottle of 190 proof Kentucky moonshine:
Shoenice is probably the best example of how YouTube stardom leads inevitably to human tragedy. Like the P.T. Barnum freak shows of yesteryear, one day you’re entertaining astonished onlookers with some curious talent you’ve discovered, and before you know it, you’re staring forlornly into the camera with the expression of a Guantanamo inmate as you stammer out the line: “So anyways, everyone’s been requesting me to eat a sock.”
