Knowing how much we at Newsnibbles enjoy stories involving cute fluffy animals, one of the interns dug up this little gem for us.
Apparently, in the Los Angeles branch of Lawry’ssome badgers were in a contest with some ducks to see who could eat the most meat.
This did seem a little unfair. Whilst ducks are omnivorous they do not have teeth. Therefore, the devouring of large amounts of meat would be more problematic for them than for badgers, who have a mouth full of sharp canine teeth.
Having investigated the report we soon discovered that the interns did not read beyond the headline. Badgers and Ducks are the names of College Football teams. American football is a lot like rugby, only with more padding and different rules. The ball is very similar. Anyway, these two giants of the game (not The Giants – who are a different team apparently – confused? You will be) pitted themselves against each other in a meat eating contest.
According to The Los Angeles Times the players from the respective teams attempted to eat “the weight of a baby” in meat in the annual Beef Bowl. The event precedes the Rose Bowl – which is a football tournament. Legend has it that whoever shall win the Beef Bowl will go on to win the Rose Bowl so there was a lot riding on the event. Apparently the Badgers were victorious in the competition consuming a massive 723lb of beef, or approximately 100 babies, compared to the Ducks, who only managed 612lb (85 babies approx).
The startling baby analogy caused one of our interns to leave the office in tears, so we asked Bee if ‘babies’ was a regular measurement used in her country. She informed us that it was not something regularly used, “but sometimes we measure animals by dairy products, i.e. a baby panda is the size of a stick of butter,” she went on to say “I think it was just to give an idea of the massive size of the meat.”
When you consider that the average cow weighs anything up to 1000lbs the teams nearly devoured an entire cow each, which is perhaps not as impressive as 100 babies.
We decided to ask the fans if they had ever taken part in an eating competition.
Andrew told us: “A mere recreational eater myself, but I can strongly recommend the description of the eating competition in Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls if you’re looking for inspirational/training material.” Which is lovely.
Annie told us “I defy anyone to challenge me to an eating competition.” She also emailed in a picture of herself in training for competitive eating, which is the one we are using with our article.
Presumably the cattle was free from bovine TB!