How Nathan's Famous turned a competitive eating contest into a national show

new york
CNN
—

Every Fourth of July since she was 15, Jacqueline Lewis has gathered with her family to participate in one of America's great traditions: the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest.

“People want to know how many hot dogs a human can eat in that amount of time,” Lewis, now 26, told CNN while (slowly) munching on a miniature corn dog outside Nathan's flagship store in Coney Island on a warm June day. “People want to know.”

Lewis and her family aren't the only ones who want to see how many frankfurters they can finish in 10 minutes. According to the Frankfurter Brand, nearly two million people watch Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on ESPN every year. Tens of thousands of spectators flock to Coney Island in Brooklyn to watch the event live. Participants train for months in advance, preparing their bodies to burn thousands of calories in just a few minutes. The contest recently made national news when it was announced that current champion Joey Chestnut had been barred from competing in this year's competition over a deal with plant-based meat company Impossible Foods.

Nathan's and the marketing visionaries behind the annual event helped shape the eating contest as we know it today, a gaudy, flashy sport that some say symbolizes America's obsession with excess.

However, the history of speed eating contests is quite old. It goes back a long way.

People have always seemed interested in how much they can eat and how quickly they can eat it.

“The race for speed and quantity also appears in Greek mythology. Edus “The story features characters in Norse mythology and in what may be humanity's first novel, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, written in the second century AD,” Jason Fagon writes in his book The Gastrointestinal Jockeys: Competitive Eating and the American Dream.

In America, the tradition dates back hundreds of years: Fagone cites a 1793 Pennsylvania newspaper that describes an event in which two men “promised to eat twenty-four ginger cakes each.”

Over time, pie-eating contests became a staple of Independence Day celebrations, “a natural catalyst at picnics, summer camps and county fairs,” Fagone wrote.

In the 19th century, there were essentially two kinds of contests, explains Adrienne Bitter, lecturer in American studies at Cornell University and author of “Diet and the Diseases of Civilization.” There were speed-eating contests, where people competed to see who could eat the most in a set amount of time, and there were open-ended contests where the winner was whoever could eat the most. Foods back then were simpler and less branded. People competed for onions, eggs, watermelon, and pie.

She said the sport was “very casual” back then, not as physically demanding as it is today, and “it was athletic in the way that three-legged racing is athletic.”

When Nathan's began hosting an annual event in the 1970s, it was more like an early contest. At the time, PR gurus Max Losey and Mortimer Mattes thought a hot dog eating contest would be a good publicity stunt for Nathan's. (They also seem to have invented the legend that the first Nathan's contest was held in 1916.)

Back then, “it still had a bit of a local flavor to it. It was mostly big guys from Long Island,” Fagone told CNN, adding that participants would show up, eat hot dogs, then go home and have a barbecue.

According to the Coney Island History Project, Melody Andorfer won Nathan's first official contest in 1972. She ate 12 hot dogs in five minutes, beating all other contestants, both male and female, she said in a 2020 interview with the nonprofit.

The first year, she recalled, Nathan's used barrels and wooden planks to set up tables for the contestants: “They put white plastic tablecloths on them, and in front of the contestants were hot dogs on paper plates, but there was no mustard or drinks. Just hot dogs.”

Decades later, in the 1990s, brothers George and Richard See took over marketing for Nathan's. George See, who still hosts the pageant, helped transform the humble event into a huge spectacle.

While Americans say the annual contest has many connotations – Coney Island, Independence Day and patriotism – organizers say the event, which sparked the rise of mainstream competitive eating in America, is essentially a publicity stunt.

“It didn't start as a sport. It was a platform to get the word out about Nathan's and a lot of the brands that came after it,” said George See, co-founder of Major League Eating, the professional league that now oversees the sport.

Sia took over the pageant after Rosie died in 1991. Before Sia took over, the pageant had just a few cameras, a handful of contestants and “15 to 20 spectators who just happened to be passing by and stopped by,” he said.

As host, Sia has developed a persona to elevate the event. He takes the stage in a flat straw hat and a suit and tie. Before the competition begins, he makes grandiose pronouncements about life and poetry as dramatic music plays. When announcing the contestants, he builds anticipation, treating the event more like a boxing match than a hot dog eating contest.

The performance is “part Coney Island, part sportswriter, part doomsday preacher,” Shea said. “It's all just amazing. You get on stage and you can say and do whatever you want, there are no rules. It's all about moving around and expressing emotion. And the reaction I get from the audience is consistently, 'That wasn't what I expected, and I really love it.'”

It took a while for the performance to go mainstream: About a decade into his tenure as pageant leader, Mr. Seer pitched an article to the Los Angeles Times, which he said introduced the idea to new parts of the country.

Mr. Shea then signed on to do documentaries and TV specials, around the same time that superstar Takeru Kobayashi came on the scene in 2001 and “wowed the world,” Mr. Shea said.

“It was serendipitous and very mutually beneficial. He had so much star power, so the timing was just right,” Shay said.

In his first year entering the contest, Kobayashi ate 50 hot dogs, nearly double the number eaten by the 2000 winner.

Kobayashi showed that “you can treat it as a sporting activity and excel,” Fagone said. The Japanese newcomer took the sport seriously, training and devised innovative ways to compete (separating hot dogs from the buns and breaking frankfurters in half before eating them).

The intensity of the training and the results justified the entire endeavor, and a few years later, ESPN began broadcasting the event.

Some people consider competitive eating to be an iconic part of American culture, for better or worse.

Eating contests are “celebrations of excess” and an integral part of the American mythology that drew immigrants in when the country was young, Vitale said. Eating contests represent “a larger fantasy of consumption without regard for the consequences, the American national fairy tale.”

Kobayashi himself shattered that illusion, revealing in the Netflix documentary “Hack Your Health” that he no longer feels hungry and that he worries that competitive speed eating will have lasting effects on his health (though he will be going head to head with Chestnut in an upcoming Netflix special).

Bitar says these contests have endured in part because of their shock value: Competitive eating contests “break all etiquette and societal norms,” ​​he says. “It's one of those moments where all our rules get broken.”

Shea also pointed to an underlying tension as to why Americans still watch the Nathan's hot dog eating contest after all these years: “An element of, 'Wait a minute, you can't do that,' or 'I can't believe he would do that.'”

But he sees the pageant as a special event, one that symbolizes something else: happiness.

“It's a piece of New York City history, but more importantly, to me, hot dogs represent the joy of summer.”

Beatrice Felman, 25, agreed. During a visit to Coney Island on a warm June day, she described hot dogs as “an American meal” and said they symbolized “patriotism and a good time.”

Fellman was one of many on the crowded boardwalk, where hundreds of beachgoers packed towels and beach chairs to soak up the sun. There was a celebratory mood: Bass thumped from speakers, a live band was playing, and about a dozen people were dancing. Despite the heat, people lined up at both Nathan's locations for their famous hot dogs and squiggle-cut fries.

“I love the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest because it brings the city together,” said Felman, who stood with friends wearing Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest T-shirts. “The contest celebrates one of America's great comfort foods: the hot dog.”