How to make easy cash, from the weird to the mundane

The brain of a cow is grey, wet and shiny. Weighing about half a kilo, it almost fills a man's cupped hands. Its surface bulges with gristly nodules. Intricately twined nerves fold over each other in a jellied mass.

Faced with 57 of these, almost 18 pounds of slippery grey goo, what would you do? Takeru Kobayashi ate them, all of them. In fifteen minutes. If this sounds like something you could do then cast aside your student loans concerns; like Kobayashi, you could be a contender in the profitable world of competitive eating.

This self-proclaimed “sport” traces its pedigree back to a New York street corner on America’s national holiday in 1916. Among Coney Island’s carnivals one man came up with a stunt to push good taste to its already strained limits, and the stomachs of revellers beyond theirs. Nathan's Famous 4th of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest is now the televised annual centrepiece of a craze expanding faster than even the waistlines of its most ardent devotees. When asked about the status of the sport, a spokesman for I.F.O.C.E. (the International Federation Of Competitive Eating), said the only event he could think of prestigious enough to warrant comparison with was the Olympics.

And it was at Nathan’s seven years ago that a sport – almost at its last gasp – suddenly perked-up, emitted a satisfied belch and started looking around for something to get its teeth into. For this it has to thank Takeru Kobayashi, aka ‘The Tsunami’. A foreigner, and weighing barely more than 11 stone, Kobayashi proved that there was more to competitive eaters than the archetypal bloated American who passes the time between barbecues circling drive-through restaurant car parks. A graduate of Japan’s National Gluttony Championships, Kobayashi was no amateur – but he proved that tactics, technique and steely determination were necessary to carry someone to the top table.

Once there, the getting’s good. The Tsunami spends £150 a week on training meals. He needs £600 a month just to cover the extensive range of supplements that stop his organs savaging him from within in their efforts to buy themselves some downtime. All this is covered by the fat prizes offered to competitors by competition sponsors. And it is these, along with the inclusion of satisfyingly British eating categories like meat pies and fry-ups, that has attracted new fans. Like me.

With thousands of pounds worth of student loan debt whipping me along in the rat race, the notion of chewing my way to solvency seemed irresistible. If only I’d found out about this earlier I wouldn’t have even needed a loan. I would never have needed to eat all those baked beans; I could have dined like a king everyday. And gotten paid for it!

This is how I ended up at a Travel Inn in London’s King’s Cross, bellying-up to a trestle table groaning with quietly congealing plates of fried breakfast. Eight other ‘gurgitators’ would be joining me in celebrating the launch of their all-you-can-eat breakfast. Like a noble council of porkers, we sat solemnly in a row while cameras clicked and a small audience stared in a mixture of admiration and respect. At least I hoped that’s what it was.

I was not alone in my plan. To my right sat Sir Scoffsalot, a theatre studies student also know as James Dingley. I admired his attitude. "If I win," he told me, "I take five hundred quid home, second means two fifty. If I lose, well, I’ve had about seven free meals". I admired his determination. He confided he’d been in training "since last night" when he’d eaten his tea "in about five minutes, a good time but one I’m hoping to better this morning".

At the other end of the scale was Rob ‘Baby Face’ Burns, the UK’s number one. Though ready with a smile, he had the eyes of a man who had looked into the abyss and found it piled to the brim with pork pies. I wouldn’t like to meet him in a dark restaurant, both reaching for the last bread roll.

I had approached a paramedic for a medical briefing prior to the competition. As the umpire raised the whistle to her lips, his warning against what I was about to do to my body rang in my mind: "kind of like haemorrhoids in your throat".

Then we were off. The eating itself passed incredibly quickly, like heavily greased lightening. The only thing I recall clearly was Sir Scoffsalot suffering what professional gurgitators generously call a ‘Roman incident’, or a ‘reversal of fortunes’. Remarkably, this happened about halfway through his first plate: he was going home with pockets and stomach empty.

When the final whistle blew and the generous thirty seconds of ‘mouth-clearing time’ was up, I had managed three and a half plates. Victory went to the unassuming Lup Fan Yau with over five. Not the mountain I had expected. He had even confided in me before we started that he was only there as a favour to a friend. Even more amazing, I had managed to almost equal Baby Face, though he didn’t look happy with his performance.

Surely this couldn’t be right? The man was a sporting titan, wasn’t he? Not like me, not just a mere mortal with a penchant for big dinners. Investigating, I asked him if he thought tactics were important to eating. "Definitely," he replied emphatically. And what were his? "To be honest," he said, "I just try and get as much of it down me as possible mate".

My suspicions were confirmed: British competitive eating is waiting for someone prepared to take it as seriously as it pretends to take itself. Wealth and glory are wide open to anyone out there with a genius for combining bread and circuses at high speed. And who has more time to think about something like that than a student?

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