Joe Vs Food

---

The Baby Burger Challenge

During our time on Hawaii Blake, Rhiannon and I became fans of a show called “Man vs Food”. On the US Travel Channel, it follows Adam Richman as he goes to various towns and cities around America taking on big eating challenges such as 4 lbs of pancakes or a 5 lb hamburger in half hour. It’s the kind of gluttony that can only be seen as admirable - let alone acceptable - in The U S of A. I don’t care, I thought the show was awesome and watched plenty of it. You can check out his website here
So when Blake and Rhiannon came in from lunch at a joint called Lulu’s and told me they had a Man Vs Food-style challenge, I knew I had to try.
It was called Lulu’s Baby Burger Challenge - 32 oz of hamburger meat to be consumed within 10 minutes. That’s about a kilo. If you beat the challenge you ate for free and got your photo put on the wall of fame.
The day after the wedding we went to Lulu’s for a bite to eat. Innocently enough, we enquired about the success rate on the Baby Burger Challenge.
"Probably 2 in 5 complete it," the waitress told us.
I hadn’t planned on taking it on but when presented with the menu, I knew that it was either now or never.
The chef came out and explained the rules. I had ten minutes to eat the whole thing, including the bun. She recommended I cut the burger into quarters to let the heat out of it and to make it more manageable. I followed her advice and a couple of minutes after letting the heat out, the clock was wound and the challenge began.
The first quarter was a piece of cake. Well, a piece of hamburger. But I knocked it over within 2 minutes - well on track to break the 10 minute barrier.
The second quarter started well. I continued at the pace on what was a larger piece than the first. It was around half way through the second portion that I started having flashbacks of the night before. The wedding reception. The after party and its $3 drinks. Beer. Wine. Vodka red bull. The meat sweats started.

"There is no happy place. There is only meat"

It had never occurred to me that eating a kilo of meat was going to be the hard part - I just figured doing it within 10 minutes would be. But by the time I had finished half the burger, in under 5 minutes to boot, I knew that the sheer quantity of food left on my plate was likely to get the better of me.
“Find the happy place,” Rhiannon said.
“There is no happy place, there is only meat,” was my response.
As I started the third portion the meat sweats really kicked in. My brow was furrowed with the sheer enormity of the meat I had already consumed and possibly even more so with the amount still ahead. Worse still, a large piece I hadn’t chewed well enough from the second portion had left me with a throbbing pain in my trachea that was made worse by every subsequent piece.
The chef came by with a little over a minute to go to see how I was doing. I knocked over the third portion and started on the fourth but knew I couldn’t finish it - simply because I didn’t want to. It was too much, whether it was in ten minutes or a whole day.
As the clock wound down I put the remnants of the burger down. Failure. Dejection. Meat.
Worst of all, the point of the challenge was that if you finish it in 10 minutes, it was free. I was $30 out of pocket.
The rest of the afternoon was spent lying on the couch, trying to let my stomach and the rest of my body come to terms with what had happened. It was like drinking way too much coffee in one sitting - I was shaking, sweating and generally feeling sick.

Food 1. Joe 0.

---

Photos

The Challenge
As it appears on the menu.

Blake, Andy and Me
With the challenge before me.

Food 1. Joe 0.
You wrote your name on a dollar bill and they stapled it to the restaurant's ceiling. I made my failure official.