Man v. Food, Eighteenth-Century Style

This James Gillray print is of greedy Germans. But really, they could be from anywhere.

I’m reading Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s absolute classic, The Physiology of Taste (1825), about the new science of gastronomy. It’s a hoot – full of brilliant apothegms, from the old chestnut ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are’ to the lesser-known, but to my mind still just as true, ‘the most indispensable quality of a good cook is promptness.’ Ha! Anyway, while reading old J.A.’s fact-packed fun-ride through the science and culture of good eating at the turn of the nineteenth century, I came across this anecdote of a late-eighteenth-century Man v. Food-style feat. We love to think that eating competitions and challenges are a modern phenomenon indicative of the downfall of society, consumer culture, overly cheap food et cetera, but it turns out men have been proving their manhood through competitive overeating for centuries.

‘This anecdote recalls to me my townsman, General P. Sibuet, long the chief aide of Napoleon, and who was killed in 1813 at the passage of the Bober.

He was eighteen years old, and had at that time the appetite by which nature announces that its possessor is a perfect man, and went one night into the kitchen of Genin, an innkeeper of Belley, where the old men of the town used to meet to eat chestnuts and drink the new white wine called in the country vin bourru.

The old men were not hungry and paid no attention to him. His digestive powers were not shaken though, and he said ‘I have just left the table, but I will bet that I eat a whole turkey.’

‘If you eat it I will pay for it,’ said Bouvier du Bouchet, a rich farmer who was present, ‘and if you do not I will eat what is left and you shall pay for it.’

They set to work at once, and the young athlete at once cut off a wing, ate it at two mouthfuls and cleaned his teeth by gnawing the bone and drank a glass of wine as an interlude.

He then went into the thigh which he ate and drank another glass of wine to prepare a passage for the rest. The second went the same way, and he had come to the last limb when the unfortunate farmer said, ‘Alas! I see it is all over, but Mr Sibouet as I have to pay, let me eat a bit.’

Prosper was as good a fellow as he was a soldier, and consented. The farmer had the carcass at spolia opima, and paid for the fowl with a good grace.

General Sibuet used always to love to tell of this feat of his youth. He said that his admitting the farmer to eat was a pure courtesy, and that he could easily have won the bet. His appetite at forty permitted none to doubt the assertion.’