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I eat, therefore I Nguyen
By Joe Nguyen
nguyejos@mscd.edu

Move over, Takeru Kobayashi. There’s a new sheriff in town.

Standing at five-feet-eight and one-half inches tall and weighing in at 175 pounds, I am the undisputed ice-cream-eating champion of the world!

Well, perhaps not quite the world, but I am the champion of this year’s A Taste of Colorado ice-cream-eating competition, a title I share with my teammates.

For the past week, I’ve been scouring the Internet. I found motivation in videos of eating legends such as Kobayashi and Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas. I searched for ways to devour mass quantities of ice cream quickly while avoiding the dreaded brain freeze. There was one practical piece of advice: avoid letting the ice cream touch the roof of my mouth.

Brain freezes may only last for 10-15 seconds, but in this sport every second counts.

I arrived at the culinary showcase on Sunday expecting a solo battle of me against the world. Little did I know that the competition was meant for teams of four. I joined up with three people named Tom, Meghan and Art who were standing by the registration area. Our makeshift lineup was set.

We laid out our strategy and dug in. The battle was fierce, and with a time of 2 minutes, 20 seconds we defeated teams of children and adolescent girls. Though it wasn’t the glorious victory I envisioned, it got us a spot in the finals.

Alas, that was our first and only match together. My teammates weren’t available to return for the finals on Monday, so I was presented with the task of forming a new team.

The first place I looked toward was my family. Like me, they’re nothing but a group of ravenous devourers with a competitive spirit. But with one day’s notice, I was only able to bring my nephew John onboard.

Having exhausted our catalog of potential eaters, we gave up searching and decided to look for some people at the festival. We met a guy named Rich and his elementary-aged son Nick. Having Rich on the team was a no-brainer. He looked to be in his early-30s and had a competitive air about him. His son was small and I knew he wouldn’t contribute much to the team, but one look at this child’s animated face and I couldn’t turn him away.

I crouched down and looked Nick in the eye and asked, “Do you think you can pull your own weight?”

“Yeah!” he answered without hesitation. With an infectious grin on his face, I knew he was going to be the heart of the team.

“All right, let’s do this,” I said as I led my new team to the eating area. It felt like we were moving in slow motion as we approached our table.

After 25 seconds, Rich stood straight up with a brain freeze. Nick followed suit soon after. At that moment I knew that it was time to kick it up a notch. With a mere glance, John knew exactly what I was thinking. We understood that this was a time for urgency. For the next 20 seconds, we methodically picked apart the block like piranhas. Like Rocky Balboa fighting against Clubber Lang, we had the eye of the tiger. Our teammates recovered and the end was soon in sight.

With only a small layer of ice cream left on the plate, I buried my face and finished what remained. All it took was 67 seconds for us to eat a half-gallon of Dreyer’s soft-churned vanilla ice cream and to be crowned the 2006 A Taste of Colorado ice-cream-eating champions.

For the rest of the day it was difficult to drink cold beverages and the roof of my mouth tasted like metal, but it was a small price to pay for this one moment of glory.