Wednesday, July 4, 2007

The Hot Dog Eating Contest!

I'm watching ESPN carry the Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Context at Coney Island at the corner of Surf Avenue and Stillwell Avenue today. It's really kind of funny - they're treating it like the Olympics or something. Everyone is very serious, they have profiles of the contestants, and I did not know you have to qualify at one of 13 qualifying events to come to Coney on July 4! Amazing!

What's kind of ironic is that (and this is NY heresy here) that I don't even think Nathan's Famous are that great....

More to the point: what does it say about us, when people in the US are hungry, when 35.1 million people in the US do not know where their next meals will come from, when right now the Church of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in NYC just today - yes they were open on July 4 - served nearly a thousand meals to anyone who showed up, that on national live TV we show a contest about which single individual can eat as much much food as possible without throwing up in 12 minutes?

RFSJ

PS - Joey Chestnut, the American challenger, set a new record and won over the favorite Takeru Kobayashu with 66 dogs eaten.

3 comments:

Maria Perez said...

Funny, I had the same thought. How can this be a sport when so many people would die to eat just one hot dog? Doesn't seem right...

Troglodyteus said...

Get a life. Do you really think commenting on a hot dog eating contest will have any impact on hunger in our country?

What does it say about us as a country? Not a blasted thing. Yes it is idiotic.

On top of that I question your statistic. Who says that “35.1 million people in the US do not know where their next meals will come from”? According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 35.1 million represents 11.6 percent of our population. Applying that to the center of the universe, New York City, means that 945,500 inhabitants do not know where their next meals will come from. Are you telling me that one in every 9 people in NYC are in that situation?

RFSJ said...

Trog,

Click on the hot link in my post about the 35.1 million and you will see where I got that figure. And maybe it's inflated. Maybe it's 30 million. Maybe it's 25 million. Even if it's "only" 25 million, that's more than the entire population of Ohio who are food insecure every day. If you have another statistic I'd be glad to see it.

And it seems to me that, as a Christian, each of us should be concerned about even one person who is hungry. How else to interpret "When ever you did this to these the least of my brothers and sisters you did it to me" in Matthew 25? And St. James reminds us in his epistle, paraphrasing, "Look, it does no good to say to a hungrey person, 'Go in peace.' You need to act out your love, not just talk about it."


Cheers,

RFSJ