Smith Street-6/22/08, 2:54 PM

Allow me a moment of Civic Pride: The Smith Street Festival is one of New York City’s best street fairs, and it is only one of three great street happenings in the summer in Cobble Hill. Due in part to the promulgation of restaurants along Smith Street, the food remains localized (no sausage-and-peppers truck for us!), and the stalls, selling everything from Sweetgrass baskets to civic participation in blocking the Atlantic Yards, provide a nice variety.

Smith Street, which anchors the three overlapping neighborhoods of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill, occupies a psychic space where many different Brooklyn themes intersect. Chief amongst these is gentrification and the ongoing real estate wars in New York. The apocryphal story goes that restaurants and bars were given tax breaks to open on Smith as part of a remarkably successful effort to gentrify the neighborhood. Now, first floor businesses on Smith–particularly those offering overpriced women’s clothing–open and close with speedy regularity. Only a block away from Smith Street sit the Gowanus Houses, and a block beyond that is Wyckoff Gardens, two very large and very poor housing projects. Around the corner from them live several celebrities.

The Smith Street area is a world where old and new coexist uneasily, where people who have lived in the neighborhood for three months immediately start fretting that Sahadi’s, the legendary store that has sold spices, nuts, and coffees along with cheap and delicious hummus, baba gannoush, and other delictables for 60 years, will be pushed out by Trader Joe’s. A neighborhood where, over coffee, young parents will discuss their favorite hustlers and beggars and do impressions of their patters. It is a place where several different immigrant populations have left their marks and where the real estate boom has not quite gone bust.

A few weeks before the Smith Street Festival, a neighbor of mine was walking down a block of Smith Street when suddenly a manhole exploded and flames shot out from underground. This lead to a downed subway line, a blackout that shut down most of the street, and several days of work by ConEdison. It seems that a transformer had exploded in the midst of the hottest day of the year–a day that would usher in a week of record-breaking May Heat. Everyone assumed that it was simply the mass uptick in power needs from air conditioning that caused the explosion, but according to a ConEd employee my girlfriend spoke to, the real story was that junkies had stripped the transformer of its copper wiring in order to sell it.

Let’s let bygones be bygones for now, however. Today, June Twenty-Second, Two Thousand and Eight, we celebrate Smith Street, or at least a sunny, nice, bouncy-castle version of it. We celebrate it the way Americans know how: Music, Capitalism, Consumption.

I am sitting in The Zombie Hut, a bar known for its Tiki theme and its zany cocktails. It is 2:57 PM. In front of me, a couple fingers of bourbon are melting the ice they’ve been poured over. Surrounding me are my girlfriend Anne Love and our friends Sydney Maresca and Oliver Butler. Despite being born in the same city, having almost identical middle names, both being theatre directors and living a 15-minute walk from each other’s doors, Oliver and I are not related.

Oliver has an almost magical ability to get people to like him…or love him, actually. When people meet me who know him, they inevitably ask Are you related to Oliver Butler? I love that guy. It’s easy to see why. He’s funny, charming, and lives one of those great Brooklyn lives, splitting his time between directing plays, being a carpenter, and doing some web design work. He and Sydney have a plot in a community garden where they regularly hold cookouts. He makes his own hot sauce and pickles. Sydney plays in The Hazzards, New York City’s Baddest Ukulele Band, and is a costume designer. They have a cat, Socrates, and regularly collaborate on theatrical projects. Beyond that, they’re funny, down-to-Earth, slightly crazy artists who remain unpretentious and approachable.

All week long, posters have gone up in the neighborhood that say on them Will Oliver Butler Defend His Title? And it is for this purpose that we have gathered at The Zombie Hut. A year ago, I cajoled Oliver into entering the now-annual Stinky Bklyn Cheese Eating Contest (I believe the phrase I used was “I have found your destiny”) and he won it in the last moments by shoving a large hunk of some kind of French goodness into his mouth and actually managing to swallow it as time was called. Oliver got his name engraved on a prize belt, his photo in a local calendar, and a chance to meet Borough President Marty Markowitz. Now the number of competitors in the contest has increased, and people running into Oliver on the street have promised to “take him down.” The pressure is on.

I look him in the eye. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

Sydney chimes in, “He’s eaten a light meal, drunk plenty of water, had a little booze to loosen up–he’s ready to defend his title.” We put down the drinks, pay the tab, and walk out of the bar into the Street Fair. A salsa band is just finishing up outside. A little ways over stands a fried chicken stall outside a restaurant that only serves local, organically-grown food, and the ubiquitous Moon Bounce sits looming over the events. The forecast called for rain, but there isn’t a touch of grey in the sky–just New York sun and so much humidity that it feels like you’re breathing a sponge.

Sydney turns to me. “Did I mention I’m actually nervous?”

I don’t admit it, but so am I.

In order to cement his reputation as the Most Badass Cheese Eater in Brooklyn, Oliver will have to eat more cheese than anyone else in two minutes. According to local gastronomes, the cheese they’re eating resembles a semi-sharp cheddar in consistency and saltiness, so staying hydrated is the key. You wouldn’t want to shove a big block of it in your mouth, only to be completely unable to swallow it.

Roughly 19 other eaters have come to take Oliver’s title from him. They range in ages from 10 to about 40 and come in all shapes and sizes. There are enough of them that they have to be divided into two heats of ten competitors each. Oliver is in the second heat.

The first group takes the stage. Everyone has whimsical nicknames like Sam “The Monster” Phelps. They stand with a half-pound of cheese in front of them. Introducing the event are Patrick and Michelle Watson. If you could trade your life in for someone else’s, there’s a good chance that you’d trade it for Patrick and Michelle’s. Tan, good-looking, beaming success from every pore, Patrick and Michelle opened Smith and Vine, a wine store, roughly four years ago. A cheese and gourmet food store dubbed Stinky BKLYN soon followed, and now they have added The Jakewalk, a bar that serves the wine and cheese that they sell at the other stores to their Smith Street Empire. They are nice and well-loved, their employees are fun and smart, and they are about to have their first child. They are emblems of the New Smith Street, running idiosyncratic businesses catering to the more well-to-do inhabitants of the area, while keeping to a small, family-owned ethos.

The cheese and the competitors are introduced by a man named Dan. Dan is a fight choreographer, actor, martial artist, and the food buyer for Stinky. He’ll discuss cheese with you with the same passion as his trip to study Aikido in Japan, a little glint of mischievousness peaking out of the corner of his eye. No one in New York is content to be one thing. As the competitors take their spots, glasses of water and half-pound blocks of cheese in front of them, a hush goes over the crowd.

The time is called, the eating begins. If this were a movie, a roar would escape from the throng, egging the people on at Brooklyn’s answer to the County Fair, cheering their gluttony. The truth of the matter is, the crowd is almost completely silent. We are awestruck by what is going on in front of us, people’s mandibles scraping along the cheese, trying to wolf it down as quickly as possible, calling for more water. The speed, dedication, and concentration amongst the competitors is equal parts enthralling and unsettling. Entering a cheese eating competition sounded vaguely awesome to me when I thought about it, but now I think I might never want to eat cheese again.

Michelle stands in front of us, yellow dress over pregnant belly, and shouts to the crowd, “COME ON, PEOPLE!! THESE GOOD FOLK ARE WORKING VERY HARD FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT! MAKE SOME NOISE!” A roar erupts from the crowd. Michelle eggs us on, her mouth open like a coxswain, bellowing at us to offer our encouragement. One of the ten is clearly winning. He is thin and tall and young, and looks like he derives no pleasure from eating cheese or, indeed, from anything at all.

Competitive Eating.

Let’s look at that phrase for a moment. In nature, all eating is competitive. You want to eat more than your fellow caterpillars, or antelope, or wolves because you want to survive. Competition is the name of the natural game. The best-adapted survive, and the best-adapted tend to be creatures who are best suited to getting food out of their environment and reproducing. Resources being finite, animals exist in a constant state of competition with one another.

This paradigm, when applied to humans, takes us down some thorny paths. Do we exist in constant competition with our fellow human beings? Does this competition justify a lack of civic compassion for those less fortunate? Should we create systems that protect against this constant competition, to mitigate the harsh needs of survival? Having evolved the capacity for compassion and the means to act on that compassion, should we, or would we, actually be doing our species great harm by doing so?

Very few people would take the latter position these days, but less than 150 years ago, the idea that human society should be organized around “social Darwinism” was quite in vogue. The term “Social Darwinism” is actually a bit of a misnomer, as the philosophy has little to do with Darwin (who did not believe that civilized humans should obey the rules of nature) and more to do with a British engineer and polymath named Herbert Spencer. Spencer (who coined the term “survival of the fittest”) believed that Darwin’s theories of evolution should be applied to society, giving ample justification to Gilded Age Robber Barons and the intellectual predecessors to the Editorial Board of the National Review that doing nothing to alleviate poverty was actually better than helping people. Spare the starvation, spoil the species.

Even Right Wing America tries to avoid speaking publicly in these terms, preferring to couch their social Darwinist agenda in phrases like “death tax” or “tax relief,” or “trickle down economics.” Beyond this, as a society, we believe in the virtue of good-natured competition. It is no surprise, then, that Competitive Eating is no longer associated with some Man In The State of Nature being nasty, brutish, and short with a gazelle, but rather with the pseudo-sport that has become quite popular in the last decade.

This pseudo-sport’s origins are a bit hard to pin down. When was the first blueberry pie downed with no hands at the county fair? The Nathan’s Annual Hot Dog Eating contest at Coney Island began in 1916. The real birth year of Competitive Eating as a codified past-time is easy enough to pin down, however. It’s 1997, the year the International Federation of Competitive Eating was born.

According to their website, the International Federation of Competitive Eating “supervises and regulates eating contests in their various forms throughout the world… [and] ensures that the sport remains safe, while also seeking to achieve objectives consistent with the public interest–namely, creating an environment in which fans may enjoy the display of competitive eating skill.” What this means is that the IFOCE regulates the various major eating competitions around the world, establishing uniform procedures, rules, and standards for Competitive Eating and Eaters (or “gurgitators,” as apparently they prefer to be called).

The IFOCE’s website intentionally looks like a trade union’s or any other official organization’s web page. It’s bland, has a Seal in the upper left hand corner, and delivers information in formalese. Their sister website Major League Eating, however, is modeled after any major College Football website. It’s filled with video and audio, helpful information about the various “athletes” you can follow, and all sorts of news about the biggest, most important Competitive Eating contest there is.

Allow me a moment of Civic Pride. The biggest, most important competitive eating competition in the world is the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest in Coney Island. It’s such a big deal that there are qualifying rounds that are held all over the country. If you win them, you get a year’s supply of hot dogs and a place at the table for the Big Contest.

Two concerns simultaneously occur to me as I write this, my chest swelling with Civic Pride and my teeth lusting after a hot dog from one of Cobble Hill’s local butcher shops. First, isn’t there something strange about professionalizing something like Competitive Eating? If it was originally just meant to be a fun thing that Pastor Bob did to raise money for a new Church roof, what joy is added to professionalizing it? Second, is there something fundamentally wrong about enjoying an abundance of food–so much food that we can throw it away for pseudo-sport in the midst of a global food crisis? The crisis won’t be solved by not-eating a ton of hotdogs, but is there not something gloating, something a bit grotesque about engaging in intentional gluttony in the midst of all the poverty and starvation of the world?

Neither of these concerns is resolved for me. I can see the logic in all sides of the argument. Regulating something makes it safer, even as professionalizing things means that the all-corrupting force of money will creep in. There is also a puritan instinct that wants to immediately turn pleasure to sin that sits somewhere in the midst of the impulse to feel guilty for enjoying one’s privilege every now and then. At the end of the day, the audience is there, and so are the competitors. They want to have a good time; this is the way they are choosing to do it.

Furthermore, there is something innocent and prelapserian-feeling about the smaller county-fair model of Competitive Eating. If the Nathan’s Annual Hot Dog eating contest has a whiff of something the Romans would go see at the Coliseum shortly before the Visigoths arrived to crash the party, the local eating contest feels like something Norman Rockwell would draw. It’s American as Apple Pie, or at least as American as an Apple Pie Eating Contest.

The Heat Goes On.

The second heat is about to begin, and Oliver (now dubbed Oliver “The Cheese Baron” Butler) is standing third from the left up on stage. The first heat has ended, and the joyless man took first place, having consumed half a pound of cheese in two minutes. The competitors all wear Stinky BKLYN T-shirts, except for the man next to Oliver–a huge man, well over six feet and wide. A man, in fact, roughly the size of a barn, who is wearing his T-shirt as a sweatband. Oliver’s side of the table has no water, so as various employees of Stinky scurry to get some, the pro-Butler corner of the crowd hushes and concentrates.

“Look at that dude,” Sydney points to Barn Man.

“He’s got headphones on,” I point out.

“His own mix, his own serious eating mix, I bet,” she offers, and a short debate ensues about what would be on Barn Man’s eating mix. We all coalesce around Linkin Park as Barn Man’s music of choice.

If only there were something as dramatic as a gunshot to begin the competition! Alas, there is only someone shouting into a microphone for the eating to commence. Oliver picks up his half-pound of cheese and bites into it, doing a sing-song-y back-and-forth weight shift from leg to leg as he stares up into the heavens. I have a feeling he’s avoiding looking at the crowd for fear it will make him nervous.

The other competitors are hard at work. Barn Man has his mix going and is chomping down, sweating under the effort and taking voluminous gulps of water. Next to him is a ten-year-old who is doing her ten-year-old best to eat as much cheese as possible. Next to her is a 20-something Asian woman who has clearly decided that, while this seemed like a good idea at the time, it was actually a big mistake. And so on and so forth as the various eaters bring their own style to it.

The crowd is, at this point, more frenzied than before. Patrick is leading a chant of “EAT IT! EAT IT! EAT IT!” We’ve even gotten into it, shouting “O-LI-VER! O-LI-VER!” And then my girlfriend Anne points to Barn Man. He is almost done with his entire half pound of cheese. With one, two, three bites, he finishes the last of it off.

Oliver is well away from finishing his first hunk. There is still a minute to go.

The announcers call out that Barn Man (whose name, in all fairness, is Will “The Cheese Champ” Millender) has finished his half-pound of cheese. Oliver’s eyes go wide with shock. Later he will tell me that, in that moment, he wondered whether he should even bother continuing to eat, seeing as how he knew at that moment he had lost and really, what was the point? But soldier on he did, as Will Millender proceeded to eat 15 oz of cheese in two minutes. That’s one ounce short of a pound. As we all told him later, Oliver may have had to give up his championship title, but he was “beaten by the best.”

Maybe you are sitting at home reading this, or perhaps you are bored at work and looking for a way to shirk your responsibilities and you’re thinking to yourself, “Hmm. Less than a pound of cheese, that doesn’t seem to be so big a deal.” Let me correct you. Cheese is very light. At gourmet stores, its price is generally calculated by the quarter pound and it is sold in amounts much less than that. Next time you are at the grocery store, check the weight of a block of cheese. You’ll see. Half a pound is a lot of cheese–a lot of stickiness and drying out of your mouth.

Now let’s imagine that you’re staring at this half-pound wedge of cheddar. Not only are you going to have to chew this half-pound wedge of cheddar, but you are also going to have to swallow it. Let’s also mention right now that although creamy in texture, most cheese is very salty and will dry your mouth out. Now let’s say that, rather than given a dinner party to eat said cheese, you have 120 seconds. And during those 120 seconds, people will be screaming at you and the hot New York Summer Sun will be shining down on your face, and to your right and left the glories of Smith Street are on full display, and over there a few blocks away is the beergarden you and your friends will retire to afterwards to regale each other with stories of food-related battle, and next to you is a man–a man as big as a barn–a man who seems to live for eating nothing but cheese all day long, and water guy isn’t coming to you fast enough to get you the water you need to swallow this big block of saltiness clogging up your cheeks. Is it any wonder that people want to treat this thing like a sport?