Major League Eating came to town for the first time for the Salt Potato Eating Championship. Sort of like a WWE event for competitive eating. Here's the object of the eaters, an upstate NY summer delicacy, salt potatoes. Each tin full of them contained 3 pounds. For 10 minutes I photographed some of the best in the world doing what they do best. Brian Dudzinski digging in early on. Eric "Badlands" Booker plugging away. Joey "Jaws" Chestnut, ranked number 1 in the world. Eater X (aka Tim Janus) bends down to shove another handful of salt potatoes into this mouth. At only 100 pounds, Judith Lee was the only gal in the competition. ; She came in 6th eating almost 9 pounds. Pat Bertoletti (left), number 2 in the world, and Joey Chestnut (right) during the last minute of the Wild Carp Week World Salt Potato Eating Championship. In the end, Joey Chestnut won by about the weight of a couple of salt potatoes. He ate 13 pounds setting a new world's record (where none existed before). In total, the competitors ate over 100 pounds during the 10 minutes of gluttony.
joey chestnut is "the man" in competitive eating. ; he has won wing bowl in philly a few times. ; these people are nuts.
The power of Twitter. ; I posted the first photo of Joey Chestnut on flickr this morning. ; As of 12:40pm it had only 45 views. ; Then someone with a ton of followers retweeted it and it got like 2500 views by 2pm. ; As of now it is closing in on 3000 views. ; It usually takes months for any of my photos to reach that amount.
I read tonight Joey ate 2 pounds in the last minute. ; He really was stuffing them in down the stretch.
I've seen Joey at the hot dog event years ago - he's a monster eater. ; I eat like a songbird yet I'm the fat one. ; Unfair. ; I must admit to having never heard of a 'salt potato', despite having grown up in New Jersey/New York. ; Just must not have been something that got around our goombah/guinea neighborhood in Paterson, being the only mick paddys on the block!
Unless you visited central NY, you wouldn't have. ; Salt Potatoes are very local and tied into Syracuse's history as the Salt City.
I used to live in Suffern - so not quite central. ; I've driven through the lake region with the family as a kid, but don't remember if I ever saw a salt potato. ; Then again, I'm the only Irishman on the planet that doesn't eat potatoes, so I wouldn't have taken notice of them anyway!
Suffern is too far downstate. ; You needed to get past Binghamton. ; Though it sounds like you would have passed on them anyways. ;
