nosh nook #166 - monday, november 2, 2009

a pizza eating feat for the ages (link)
11.1.09 - slice - by daniel zemans

pizza may have become a staple of many americans' diets, but i have a love-hate relationship with it. growing up, whether it was ellio's or a regular pie, i ate a ton of it. from evenings where my mom was working & my dad had to make dinner to pizza parties at school & birthday parties at chuck e cheese, i ate it at least once or twice a week. at some point in the last few years though, because i'd eaten so much of it over the years, i sort of became sick of it. i still have a slice or two every once in a while, but those times are few & far between & when i do eat pizza, it's usually at someone else's urging.

some people never grow sick of pizza though. take chicago's craig scharoff. as slice (serious eats' pizza blog) reports, back in september, scharoff made a claim that he loved pizza so much that he could eat it every day for the rest of his life. his business partner challenged his claim, offering up a "four-figure sum" if he ate nothing but sausage pizza for every single meal during the month of october. over the past month, the pizza-eating drama has been playing out on LTH forum, a "chicago-based culinary chat site" & as slice notes, it really was no challenge, as scharoff "made it clear by the middle of october that he was an unstoppable pizza-eating force."

this past saturday marked the final day of the sausage pizza-eating challenge & since he passed the test with flying colors, he's now a little bit richer. in addition, "he never felt sick the entire month and, as of october 29, he lost 6 pounds since the challenge began." what's even more nuts is that he claims that "he could do another 30 days if not for all the pictures and documenting he had to do." in fact, according to slice, "tonight, this great man, this pizza-eating machine, this hero to us all...tonight, he plans to eat pizza."