The fluorescent lights of Fat Sandwich Company seem especially bright today, with five tables aligned in a U and perhaps fifty people packed into the restaurant to witness a feat in competitive eating. There is a Food Network crew here, taping a pilot for “Outrageous Food,” a new series. They bustle about with their cameras and cables, setting up shots and creating the magic of Hollywood in a tiny drunkard’s haven in Champaign, Illinois.
John Jaeger, six feet tall and three hundred pounds of tattoos and bushy black beard, cracks a wide grin. He is the undisputed champion of the Big Fat Ugly, a monstrous sandwich, approximately the same weight as a full-grown Chihuahua.
The Big Fat Ugly, for those who aren’t familiar, is about the size of a football and filled with twenty deep-fried ingredients ranging from cheese steak to jalapeño poppers to mozzarella sticks. With a $25 dollar price tag, this is hardly your ordinary college kid’s meal, but the reason we’re all here today, myself and the fifty-odd spectators, as well as the Food Network crew, is to watch five students, including the reigning champion Jaeger, tackle this belly-busting super-sandwich in fifteen minutes or less. The prize? The cost of the sandwich, a free Fat Sandwich t-shirt, and fifteen minutes of fame.
Jaeger, who has been a Fat Sandwich employee since August of 2009, holds the nationwide record for the fastest completion time of the Big Fat Ugly. He finished the beastly sandwich in a paltry ten and a half minutes in October 2008, shortly after Fat Sandwich Company opened its doors to the Illinois campus. Two years later, Jaeger remains the only man to have successfully completed the Big Fat Ugly Challenge at the Illinois Fat Sandwich location, and has additionally become the only person in the country ever to successfully complete the Big Fat Ugly Challenge twice.
“You can’t treat it like a lady,” Jaeger says of the Big Fat Ugly. “You have to treat it like a monster. You have to attack it.” Jaeger, who has had previous success in the arena of competitive eating, having downed in less than an hour an oversized cheeseburger known as the Premium Ethyl at R-Place, a Morris, Illinois truck stop, says that competitive eating is a matter of both willpower and training.
“The stomach is a muscle. You have to stretch it if you want to use it,” he says. Jaeger explains his technique of water training; in preparation for a challenge such as the Big Fat Ugly, he spends several days beforehand stretching his stomach to its limits by drinking a gallon of water in fifteen minutes twice daily.
A warm, personable fellow, Jaeger is somehow both modest and imposing at the same time, joking before the challenge that he’s willing to give the other four participants a head start. The folks from the Food Network are eating it up, and when the competition commences, Jaeger is the clear favorite. The crowd has swollen in size, and there are many more students outside, craning their necks and peeking in through the plate-glass windows to see what all the fuss is about.
Wolfing down the first half of his Big Fat Ugly in four and a half minutes, less than half the time of any of the other four contestants, Jaeger tears the sandwich apart, indiscriminately shoving fistfuls of cheeseburger, mini corndogs, French fries, and pizza bites into his mouth. It’s an all-out melee, an Old West showdown between a man and a comically oversized sandwich.
His thick beard drenched in grease and bits of food, Jaeger begins to slow down about a third of the way into the second half, but maintains a steady pace. None of the other contestants come close, and by the end, even they cheer him on as he swallows the last small mound of French fries with thirteen minutes and fifty-one seconds elapsed.
“It’s not for the faint of heart,” says a grinning Jaeger. “It’s not for the faint of taste buds, either.”
Vocab
Egregarious
The act of being funny and affable to the point of awkwardness.
Samantha had to break up with Julian because of his egregarious nature. The final straw was when he fondled Jessica’s breast because Jessica playfully asked him to.
Most Recent Shoutouts
