Since 2005, Paul Page has been ESPN’s play-by-play announcer for the event, with Richard Shea as the color man. I think this is what I heard them saying:

Paul Page: “Look at the way Joey ‘Jaws’ Chestnut is dunking his dogs in water to make them slide down his throat better.”

Richard Shea: “Joey better watch it. He doesn’t want to vomit in this pressure situation, or he’ll be DQ’d.”

Joey Chestnut and Takeru “Tsunami” Kobayashi, who’s won the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest six years, are the two gladiators of competitive eating. Kobayashi owns the world record of 53 ¾ hot dogs in twelve minutes, leaving competitors in the dusk and wondering if he should be tested for steroids.

Just kidding. But he got his match on July 4 when “Jaws” defeated him after tying his archrival in a 10-minute chow-down and then beating him in a five-dog eat-off. Told you this was like a sporting competition.

What happened is that both men were tied at 59 frankfurters after 10 minutes, after which they made to gobble another five dogs in a tiebreaker. Joey Chestnut won by a nose.

Which would be appropriate because Joey probably did eat part of a pig’s nose during this Super Bowl of eating. The vast majority of America’s hot dogs are made from pork “byproducts,” and that’s a euphemism for just about anything between the head and tail,  including ground-up snouts and lips.

Don’t take my word for it. No less an authority than a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, quoted in Hog Farm magazine, confirmed that “hot dogs contain skeletal muscles, along with parts of pork stomach, snout, intestines, spleens, edible fat, and yes, lips.” Don’t forget the preservatives, to keep this disgusting ground-up mixture all “fresh,” but I digress.
 
I understand that pork, marketed as the nation’s “other white meat,” is a staple of the American diet. It’s not unusual for folks to eat pork three times a day: bacon or sausage in the morning, a ham sandwich at lunchtime, and pork chops and a salad with bacon bits for dinner. Fast food establishments have watched their earnings sizzle by topping every hamburger and chicken sandwich in sight with strips of salty bacon; they go by names like Big Bacon Classic, Big Country Bacon, Cravin’ Bacon Cheeseburger, Mesquite Bacon Cheeseburger, and Arch Deluxe with Bacon.

This is what writer Stephan Jack had to say about pigs: “Pigs can eat nearly anything that remotely resembles food, including stuff that humans choose not to ingest or could not digest—picture the classic image of the slop bucket and you get the idea. They can even derive nutrition from human excrement, eliminating a sanitary problem for their human masters in the process.”

This quote illustrates the fundamental difference between pigs—which eat any swill, any pail of fecal matter thrown their way—and animals that take their time chewing grass and grains that rise out of the earth. As much as the National Pork Producers Council wants to put a positive spin on things, pigs have a simple stomach arrangement: whatever gets eaten wends its way through the digestive tract very quickly, not allowing enough time for proper digestion of nutrients or the elimination of wastes. So a pig can chomp on a pail of you-know-what from the outhouse and not be bothered in the least. They will even eat their own excrement if hungry enough.

Remember, you are what they ate!