Flashback: competitive eating at Harvey Mudd College 9 March 2011 3:09 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cross-posting,eating,events,food as spectator sport,school,silly,writing , add a commentOkay, so if all goes according to plan, soon you will call me Master (hey, I’m writing a self-indulgent flashback to undergraduate days at engineering school; I get to be as geeky as I want). Which is to say that if all continues according to plan this should be my last semester of my Master’s degree in food studies (concentration: food systems and policy, and please feel free to forward that information and my resumé to anyone you know who’s hiring food geeks) at NYU! So. In an effort to finish said Master’s, I’m in a class called Research Applications, in which my fellow last-semester students and I help each other work on big research projects. Which, it turns out, has a way of inspiring me to write blog posts, or at least this one.
One of my classmates (who will remain anonymous at least until she reads this post and tells me if she’s OK with my using her name) is writing about “extreme eating”—Man Versus Food, the Heart Attack Grille, stuff like that. One angle she’s particularly interested in is how college students engage in extreme eating and the gendered dimensions of such activity. Which sent me into a little flashback earlier today, because (perhaps unsurprisingly) something about the male-dominated environment of my undergrad engineering college did in fact lend itself to regular events involving some degree of competitive eating, a few of which I will now describe (and link to my class discussion board in case anybody’s interested in reading more than a summary). (more…)
