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One morning in 2007, Peter Czerwinski and several friends visited a breakfast pub. He was feeling particularly hungry, so he ordered a dish called "The Linebacker," which contained two of every breakfast item on the menu. After wolfing it down, he noticed his friends were only a quarter of the way through their plates. And he was still hungry. Also, he was curious: How many Linebackers could a person eat in one sitting?
"The record was two plates in an hour. I did four," says Czerwinski, who at the time was studying mechanical engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
Realizing he had an uncommon capacity to consume food, Czerwinski went in search of other gustatory challenges. He shattered restaurant records. He competed in online eating contests. After eating a 72-ounce steak (sirloin, medium rare) in six minutes and 48 seconds, setting a new world record, he drew the attention of the competitive eating circuit in the United States and was invited to put his mouth up against some stiffer competition.
Now 27 years old, Czerwinski has been a professional eater since 2008, winning contest after contest and earning a living through sponsorships, prizes, YouTube videos and television appearances. He has consumed a profusion of pie and pizza and pulled pork, a mountain of meatballs, a cornucopia of cabbage and curry and chicken wings, a barge of burgers, a superfluity of sandwiches and sausages, a deluge of dumplings and a wagonload of watermelons and waffles. He's guzzled a bottle of olive oil, downed a pound of butter and survived the Trinidad Moruga Scorpio (the world's hottest pepper).
In short, Czerwinski, known as...