PATRICIA FIELD Top; AMERICAN APPAREL Bottoms.


Edible sees my look of bewilderment followed quickly by relief and says, “I’m not currently in training.” I feel like a doofus who took a porn star on a date and expected something more than a kiss good night. “Leading up to a competition I eat whatever the competition food is. But if we ate like that all the time we would be broke or dead.” She writes off her grocery receipts when she does her taxes and bemoans the cost of certain foods now that she’s moved away from her parents’ house in suburban New Jersey to an apartment in New York City—the land of few supermarkets. “My parents don’t like competitive eating,” she explains. “So you know how some kids smoke in their rooms? I was cooking hot dogs on a hot plate in my bedroom.”

Then Edible commits sacrilege: “To be honest, I don’t like the taste of hot dogs.”

Her current personal high with meat in tube form is 20 in 10 minutes, but she thinks she’ll be able to take down 25 next Fourth of July at the Nathan’s Famous contest. “That’s the biggest event,” Edible says. “I travel to other contests on the weekends, but Nathan’s is the only one that is nationally televised.”

Edible has also been seen on television while not stuffing her face; she received her “Edible” stomach lettering from Tim Hendricks on NY Ink. “I just love my eater name, so I got it,” she says of the moniker she adopted to join the world of Eater X, Gravy Brown, and Crazy Legs Conti. Whenever I see a young woman with a stomach tattoo, I wince and think of her future. But Edible says, “I look like I’m pregnant after every competition and the ink hasn’t stretched.”