Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
Speaker 1: I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated March twenty
Speaker 1: twenty six. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading service
Speaker 1: intended for people who are blind or have other disabilities
Speaker 1: that make it difficult to read printed material. Please join
Speaker 1: me now for the first article, which is the second
Speaker 1: part of When Coyotes Threatened livestock on Central Texas Ranches.
Speaker 1: The solution was to unlock an ancient ability in dogs.
Speaker 1: Killing the predators is not nearly as effective as the
Speaker 1: intimidating presence of well trained guardians, a role some breeds
Speaker 1: have played for five thousand years. By Chris Pomorski. In
Speaker 1: the first part, we learned how rising coyote predation has
Speaker 1: threatened sheep and goat ranching on Texas's Edwards Plateau, and
Speaker 1: how traditional predator killing methods ultimately proved insufficient through the
Speaker 1: story of multi generational rancher Robin Giles and later his
Speaker 1: son Grant. Part one showed how decades of trapping, poisoning,
Speaker 1: and fencing failed to keep pace with expanding predator populations
Speaker 1: as ranching communities fragmented and land use changed. By the
Speaker 1: early twenty first century, coyotes and other predators were causing
Speaker 1: catastrophic livestock losses, pushing many ranchers to the brink of
Speaker 1: financial collapse and endangering a way of life deeply tied
Speaker 1: to Texas history and identity. In response, we traced the
Speaker 1: rediscovery and refinement of livestock guardian dogs, an ancient solution
Speaker 1: largely neglected in the United States. Rancher Bob Buckholtz emerged
Speaker 1: as a central figure who revived and perfected breeding and
Speaker 1: training methods that emphasize early bonding between dogs and livestock,
Speaker 1: careful management, and selective culling. Drawing on traditions thousands of
Speaker 1: years old, Buckholts and others demonstrated that guardian dogs deter
Speaker 1: predators primarily through presents, scent marking, and barking, rather than violence.
Speaker 1: Their success has reshaped modern ranching practices, inspired academic research
Speaker 1: and extension programs such as those at Texas A and M,
Speaker 1: and helped restore guardian dog's reputation as one of the
Speaker 1: most effective sustainable tools for protecting livestock and predator rich landscapes.
Speaker 1: Here now is part two. The next morning, we drove
Speaker 1: to another least property outside El Dorado. We got out
Speaker 1: of the truck beside a trough where a flock of
Speaker 1: views had gathered with their lambs, attended by several dogs.
Speaker 1: I shivered in the wind, and Buckholtz fingered my fleece.
Speaker 1: A skeptical merchant appraising an inferior product. You're wearing polyester,
Speaker 1: he said, it's a lot cheaper to the American public.
Speaker 1: His son, he noted, approvingly, war wool. That's pretty unusual.
Speaker 1: Most your age where polyester. At the same time there
Speaker 1: saying the environments being ruined by all these microfibers, Well,
Speaker 1: welcome to reality, Bubba. The Buckholtzes left the wool and
Speaker 1: mohair business years ago, despairing of vanishing profits and labor.
Speaker 1: An operation of their size might once have employed twenty
Speaker 1: five people. Like the other ranchers I spoke to, they
Speaker 1: now rely almost entirely on family. Instead, their live stock
Speaker 1: are raised for meat, though more than seventy percent of
Speaker 1: the lamb consumed in the US is now imported. Think
Speaker 1: of the high end cuts whose origins in Australia and
Speaker 1: New Zealand are advertised on menus and in whole foods
Speaker 1: display cases. Texas lamb and mutton often end up on
Speaker 1: the coasts, where they are sold in markets that cater
Speaker 1: to emigrants. That demand has kept the Buckholtzes in business.
Speaker 1: We're trying to learn more about our consumer how to
Speaker 1: make a better product for them. Robert said. He worries that,
Speaker 1: like the descendants of Texas ranchers, second and third generation
Speaker 1: immigrants will abandon tradition, that they too will order grub
Speaker 1: hub rather than a whole goat from the halal butcher.
Speaker 1: When Grant and Misty Guiles of Hillingdon Ranch reached Buckholtz
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen, he had a year's long wait list
Speaker 1: for puppies. Grant couldn't afford the delay and bought a
Speaker 1: number of guardian dogs from breeders and other ranchers. The
Speaker 1: results were not what he had hoped for. Feral and
Speaker 1: distrustful of people, the Gileses first dogs refused to accept
Speaker 1: food from them. The dogs also frequently went a wall.
Speaker 1: Grant and Misty found themselves spending a lot of time
Speaker 1: replacing the batteries for their collar GPS trackers. One day,
Speaker 1: their four dogs crossed onto an adjacent property and attacked
Speaker 1: the owner's chickens. The neighbors shot two of them. The
Speaker 1: Gileses finally got their first Buckholts dogs in twenty twenty fe.
Speaker 1: Today they have fourteen plus one dog they adopted from
Speaker 1: a rancher who was going out of business. They all
Speaker 1: have the behaviors were looking for. Robin Giles, now eighty three,
Speaker 1: said on a recent morning their live stock had adjusted
Speaker 1: to the dog's presence and having drastically reduced predation. Giles said,
Speaker 1: we are in charge of our own destiny. Later, Grant, Misty,
Speaker 1: and I toured the property on a rugged four wheeler. Grant,
Speaker 1: in forest Camo, pushed the vehicle full throttle, up and
Speaker 1: down steep grades over saplings and dense brush. Stones and
Speaker 1: dust flew in through a hole in the floor. Grant
Speaker 1: described passing scenery with encyclopedic intimacy, a hidden spring, variations
Speaker 1: in soil, a catalog of plants in their uses post oak, blackjack, escarpment, sherry,
Speaker 1: he said, indicating ash, juniper, live oak, texas, per simmon,
Speaker 1: king ranch, blues, little blue stem yellow, Indian grass, eastern
Speaker 1: gamma grass, Spanish oak, wild grape. He explained, if you
Speaker 1: don't know what's supporting your livestock, how the land responds
Speaker 1: to grazing pressure you're behind. I'm never bored driving through
Speaker 1: a pasture. Every plant is telling you a story. We
Speaker 1: stopped at dog feeding stations where Misty checked the attached
Speaker 1: cameras and replenished feed. The Galleses go through one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty pounds of dog food a week, a major expense.
Speaker 1: The stations were made from metal cages that once housed
Speaker 1: oil industry fuel bladders. Effective at repelling deer and hogs,
Speaker 1: they're accessible to smaller critters. Traps were set beside them.
Speaker 1: One contained a mournful raccoon. In addition to dog food,
Speaker 1: Grant said, raccoons will eat the lips and noses off
Speaker 1: live baby goats. He withdrew a pistol, inserted its muzzle
Speaker 1: into the trap, and fired Texas stockmen often openly hostile
Speaker 1: toward animal rightists sometimes make unlikely and persuasive Advocates for
Speaker 1: non lethal predator control. Guardian dogs is the first line
Speaker 1: of defense, rather than poison traps and helicopter hunts, But
Speaker 1: like most of the ranchers I talk to, Grant emphasize
Speaker 1: that even with guardian dogs, lethal methods are sometimes necessary.
Speaker 1: Certain especially shrewd coyotes can circumvent even seasoned livestock. Guardians
Speaker 1: and large boar hogs often aren't intimidated by the dogs,
Speaker 1: which will fight to the death defending their flocks. Such
Speaker 1: situations argue for mounting up heavily armed or temporarily paddocking
Speaker 1: the herds and setting traps at the same time. Once
Speaker 1: guardian dogs establish an equilibrium, ranchers are well advised not
Speaker 1: to upset it. Killing a coyote that's not preying on
Speaker 1: livestock will create a vacuum which might be filled by
Speaker 1: one that's unfamiliar with the local order and thus inclined
Speaker 1: to look on livestock as food. Adapting to this reality
Speaker 1: can be challenging. Ten or fifteen years ago, when Bob
Speaker 1: Buckholtz would say something like that if you have a coyote,
Speaker 1: don't kill it. That sounded like crazy talk, Grant said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really sink in when you haven't got guard
Speaker 1: dogs on your place. Hillingdon Ranch today has about thirty owners,
Speaker 1: all of them related to its founders. Homesteads, including the
Speaker 1: one where Grant and Misty live with their two young sons,
Speaker 1: are scattered across the property, but many of Hillingdon's more
Speaker 1: than three hundred potential heirs live in other states, and
Speaker 1: the Guleses are the only professional ranchers in the group,
Speaker 1: managing most of the original thirteen thousand acres through a
Speaker 1: combination of partnerships, leases, and diplomacy within the family. Selling
Speaker 1: out is severely frowned upon. Once that happens, it's never
Speaker 1: going to be converted back into rangeland Grant said, want
Speaker 1: to give ourselves the best chance of survival. Robin Giles's house,
Speaker 1: which belonged to his father Palmer before him, serves as
Speaker 1: a headquarters and a gathering place for events, holidays, baptisms, weddings, funerals.
Speaker 1: Several members of the extended family have asked to be
Speaker 1: buried on the ranch. Others already are at a cliff
Speaker 1: side lookout. We watched golden eagles crews below us over
Speaker 1: a deep rocky canyon where ram lambs were pastured among
Speaker 1: lounging cattle. It was a high, flat, beautiful place. Palmer
Speaker 1: had asked to be interred there, but the ground proved
Speaker 1: too hard and the family went to plan b careful
Speaker 1: to follow Palmer's instructions that his grave be unfenced, so
Speaker 1: that livestock could always tread over it. On the way
Speaker 1: back to headquarters, two guardian dogs, George and Reba, bounded
Speaker 1: onto our path. Both were tall and slim, cream colored
Speaker 1: with slightly matted fur and large dark eyes. Their sheep
Speaker 1: were nearby, audible but out of sight. The dogs were benign,
Speaker 1: but aloof Once they were satisfied we weren't a threat,
Speaker 1: their interests clearly lay elsewhere. It's an oddity of livestock
Speaker 1: guardian dogs that their owners almost never observed them interact
Speaker 1: with the predator. Their art is practiced mostly unseen in
Speaker 1: the low light of dusk and dawn, when their enemies
Speaker 1: are most active. The proof of their value is the
Speaker 1: simple absence of death. Misty, whom all the dogs like best,
Speaker 1: disembarked and poured some kibble. After a few cautious bites,
Speaker 1: George fled, running across the trail and into the trees
Speaker 1: his sheep. Misty said, We're getting too far away for
Speaker 1: his liking. Reba lingered a little longer over her food,
Speaker 1: then she too was gone. Fun fact, dogs have long
Speaker 1: guarded livestock and people. Our canine friends have protected livestock
Speaker 1: from predators for at least five thousand years, but they
Speaker 1: have possessed symbolic powers too. Clay figurines of large guard dogs,
Speaker 1: possibly Assyrian mastiffs, from around six fifty BCE, were unearthed
Speaker 1: from a place in Neneveh in modern day Iraq, believed
Speaker 1: to be placed there to ward off evil. Each dog's
Speaker 1: name was carved in cuneiform into its side, loud as
Speaker 1: his bark, biter of his foe, don't think bite, catcher
Speaker 1: of the enemy, expeller of evil. Next, get your red
Speaker 1: hot History lesson how the hot dog rose from Coney
Speaker 1: Island carts to platters at presidential picnics. A simple sausage
Speaker 1: from Germany overtook ballparks and back yards to become the
Speaker 1: quintessential handheld meal that is decidedly all American. By Rebecca Toy,
Speaker 1: It was hardly a typical state dinner. On June eleventh night,
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty nine, George the sixth of England attended a
Speaker 1: picnic retreat at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's residence in Hyde Park,
Speaker 1: New York, where the king, for the first time in
Speaker 1: his life, tasted a hot dog. The treats arrived on
Speaker 1: silver platters after polishing off his first dog, the king
Speaker 1: went back for a second, and Washington, d Cy's Times
Speaker 1: Herald celebrated this expression of Anglo American solidarity. To day,
Speaker 1: we can bellow down the Coney Island Boardwalk, our voices
Speaker 1: uplifted in pride that the hot dog truly makes the
Speaker 1: whole world kin. The hot dog's great success has always
Speaker 1: transcended class, wrapping the modern history of the United States
Speaker 1: into a portable bun. It all began with the five
Speaker 1: million Jewish immigrants who arrived in two large waves from
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty to eighteen ninety during one of the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolutions periods of rapid urbanization. The first hot dogs, then
Speaker 1: called Frankfurters or wis Wursts, likely emerged in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, when German immigrants started selling bun wrapped sausages
Speaker 1: from push carts with coal fed fire boxes in New
Speaker 1: York's Bowery. These summered or steamed sausages had that special
Speaker 1: old world snap, finely ground pork or beef stuffed into
Speaker 1: natural casing that popped with the first bite, a sensation
Speaker 1: that hot dog purists still seek. Portable and tantalizingly inexpensive,
Speaker 1: these street eats were designed for teeming city scapes. By
Speaker 1: the eighteen seventies, more than twenty five thousand week end
Speaker 1: visitors flocked to sunny beaches, hand carved carousels and vaudeville
Speaker 1: performers on Coney Islands, sandy paths, and later board walks.
Speaker 1: In the next decade, as factories and mills joined banks
Speaker 1: and department stores in offering workers a half holiday on Saturdays,
Speaker 1: more and more folks came to enjoy the sea side
Speaker 1: on weekends, and they required cheap eats. It was on
Speaker 1: the board walk that the hot dog began to secure
Speaker 1: its spot on the American menu. Charles Feltman, a baker
Speaker 1: and street cart vendor, is widely credited with popularizing the
Speaker 1: sausage in a bun formula. The eighteen ninety three World's
Speaker 1: Columbian Exposition in Chicago, better known as the World's Fair,
Speaker 1: introduced millions to this handy treat, and by the end
Speaker 1: of the century, hot dog vendors were bustling about racing
Speaker 1: tracks and America's beloved baseball fields. While there's heated debate
Speaker 1: over the origins of the name, and though doxins are
Speaker 1: often invoked, historian Bruce Craig argues persuasively that it's actually
Speaker 1: a result of the sausage's popularity among the youth. Hot
Speaker 1: dog was already slang for a swaggering young man who
Speaker 1: loitered with other flashy dandies around public amusements and gobbled
Speaker 1: up sausages from vendors. The slang spread, and by the
Speaker 1: time Nathan Handwerker Feltman's Coney Island Protegee started Nathan's famous
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixteen, hot dog was ubiquitous by the turmoil
Speaker 1: of the nineteen thirties. The hot dog conjured the sense
Speaker 1: of a simple but satisfying life that might lie within reach,
Speaker 1: even amid the Great Depression. On February tenth, nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 1: National Papers printed Walt Mason's Owed to the Lowly Life,
Speaker 1: in which the columnist declared, in verse, I find life
Speaker 1: far more delicious in my humble hot dog stand for
Speaker 1: the men in lofty places stir resentment. Everywhere. Someone longs
Speaker 1: to punch their faces, someone yearns to pull their hair.
Speaker 1: The hot dog also nourished American ideals amid the patriotic
Speaker 1: fervor of World War II. In November nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: a reporter for the Detroit Free Press marveled at the
Speaker 1: Wiener's journey. The hot dog may have a long Teutonic ancestor,
Speaker 1: but from white house to hovel, he's a thoroughly naturalized American,
Speaker 1: now without a single Nazi sympathy. Post war prosperity meant
Speaker 1: carnivorous Americans could and did turn to other meats, and
Speaker 1: the Hamburger muscled in as the new diner darling. Yet
Speaker 1: hot dogs remained at the center of American open air rituals,
Speaker 1: from new suburban backyard barbecues to nights at the drive in.
Speaker 1: And there was always baseball. A proverb coined by one
Speaker 1: of the era's biggest movie stars, Humphrey Bogart, captures an
Speaker 1: American truth. A hot dog at the game beats roast
Speaker 1: beef at the ritz. The hot dog has proved infinitely
Speaker 1: adaptable as baseball traveled south of the border. The classic
Speaker 1: ballpark Dog took a trip to Hermacillo, Mexico in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies and returned a decade later as the Snorin Dog,
Speaker 1: now wrapped in bacon and buried under pental beans, onions
Speaker 1: to tomatoes and jalapagos. Even the meat was not sacro sanct,
Speaker 1: with tofu pups and soy boy knot dogs widely hitting
Speaker 1: markets early in the nineteen eighties for the rising health
Speaker 1: conscious movement. In the nineteen nineties, Hollywood's famous Pink's Hot
Speaker 1: Dogs restaurant introduced topping combinations based on celebrities preferences, like
Speaker 1: the Rosy O'Donnell chili mustard, onion and sauerkrat, or the
Speaker 1: Drew Barrymore Jalapeno dog chili mustard, onions, cheddar, and three
Speaker 1: slices of bacon. While modern purists balk at such liberties,
Speaker 1: doubling down on arguments about the acceptability of skinless dogs
Speaker 1: in ketchup, there's always a place for the dirt cheap
Speaker 1: hot dog. Costco built a whole business model around that
Speaker 1: very nostalgia. Its quarter pound all beef hot dog served
Speaker 1: with a large drink, has famously stayed inflation proof at
Speaker 1: a dollar fifty, though it wasn't easy. Twenty eighteen interview,
Speaker 1: then CEO Craig Jellinik recounted a showdown with the company's
Speaker 1: co founder, Jim sinegal. I said, Jim, we can't sell
Speaker 1: this hot dog for about fifty We are losing our
Speaker 1: rear ends. Sinegal purportedly responded that if Jelinek raised the price,
Speaker 1: I will kill you. Figure it out. They switched from
Speaker 1: Hebrew National and started making their own Kirkland signature dogs,
Speaker 1: and the problem was polished off. Accompanying this article What's
Speaker 1: in a hot Dog? How the sausage gets made. Early
Speaker 1: hot dogs were generally made from finely ground pork, sometimes
Speaker 1: mixed with beef, along with simple spices, all encased in
Speaker 1: animal intestines, usually from sheep or hogs. Some vendors were
Speaker 1: suspected of including subpar trimmings and fats. Today, most commercial
Speaker 1: hot dogs are packed with emulsified trimmings of beef, chicken,
Speaker 1: and or pork. The pulverized meat is mixed with preservatives, coloring,
Speaker 1: and spices. Next, this helmet kept an Air Force pilot
Speaker 1: safe as she was soaring through the glass ceiling. When
Speaker 1: a young Nicole Malachowski was dreaming about becoming a fighter pilot,
Speaker 1: she couldn't have imagined. The heights sheet fly as part
Speaker 1: of the Elite Thunderbirds by Elana Cher, from the earliest
Speaker 1: bronze armor to today's lightweight carbon fiber lids. A helmet's
Speaker 1: job has always been simple to protect the head of
Speaker 1: the person wearing it, but it can also tell us
Speaker 1: thrilling stories of technological imagination and sheer human grit. The
Speaker 1: gentechs HGU fifty five slash P is a standard issue
Speaker 1: flight helmet for pilots in the United States Air Force,
Speaker 1: but the one we're talking about here comes from a
Speaker 1: specialized squadron, the elite Precision Flying Aerial Demonstration team known
Speaker 1: as the Thunderbirds, famous for their acrobatic air shows. Membership
Speaker 1: in military demonstration teams is highly competitive, and any one
Speaker 1: who makes the cut is forgive us a rare bird.
Speaker 1: But this helmet belonged to a standout even among those
Speaker 1: top shelf pilots. The first woman to perform with the
Speaker 1: Thunderbirds Colonel Niko Malachowski. In nineteen seventy nine. When Malachowski
Speaker 1: was a five year old in Santa Maria, California, she
Speaker 1: decided she wanted to be a military pilot, but there
Speaker 1: weren't any women in combat positions. In sixth grade, I
Speaker 1: stood up in front of my whole class and I said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be a fighter pilot. She tells Smithsonian
Speaker 1: and everybody started laughing, and my teacher said, sit down
Speaker 1: and come back next week when you have something more realistic.
Speaker 1: I did not know that it was against the law,
Speaker 1: and it would be against the law until nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: two for women to be fighter pilot. That might have
Speaker 1: been the end of it, but Malachowski wasn't going to
Speaker 1: be kept from the skies. She started flying lessons when
Speaker 1: she was twelve and made her first solo flight at sixteen.
Speaker 1: She might have become a commercial pilot, but for a
Speaker 1: well timed family visit to the Smithsonian during summer vacation. There,
Speaker 1: Malachowski learned about the Women Air Force Service Pilots aka
Speaker 1: the WASPS, the civilian female squad who ferried aircraft, transported cargo,
Speaker 1: and assisted with training and support during World War Two.
Speaker 1: In a dark, dusty corner was a very small picture
Speaker 1: of the Women Air Force Service pilots. I had never
Speaker 1: heard of them. Women were flying military aircraft. They weren't
Speaker 1: flying in combat, but they were training men to go
Speaker 1: to combat, and that reinvigorated my goal. Malachowski's focus paid
Speaker 1: off in nineteen ninety two when she was accepted into
Speaker 1: the Air Force Academy, just in time to see the
Speaker 1: band lit on women flying combat missions. Malachowski flew twenty
Speaker 1: six such missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom before being chosen
Speaker 1: for the Thunderbird's assignment in two thousand and five. Over
Speaker 1: the next two years, she performed at more than one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty events, sometimes maneuvering her playing mere inches
Speaker 1: from her teammates as they soared in tightly coordinated formations
Speaker 1: designed to show off the Air Force's finest pilots and equipment.
Speaker 1: The helmet, which now resides at the National Air and
Speaker 1: Space Museums Stephen f Udverhesy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, also
Speaker 1: tells a story of innovation about the forces that each
Speaker 1: generation of jet pilot has faced in the cockpit. You
Speaker 1: can study the transition from the very beginning of aviation
Speaker 1: and see how the stresses and strains on a pilot
Speaker 1: have changed over time, just based on the flight clothing
Speaker 1: that they wear, says Alex Spencer, curator of the Flight
Speaker 1: Materialerial Collection and the British and European Military Aircraft Collection
Speaker 1: at the National Air and Space Museum, which holds three
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty six flight helmets from the first days
Speaker 1: of pilotry to the present. In early planes with open cockpits,
Speaker 1: pilots were mostly concerned about staying warm in the rushing wind.
Speaker 1: They wore snoopy helmets, as Spencer puts it, just a
Speaker 1: little leather cap to keep the wind out of their hair.
Speaker 1: By the time F sixteen supersonic jets entered the picture
Speaker 1: in the late nineteen seventies, pilots had a whole different
Speaker 1: set of physical needs. By the nineties, when Malachowski started
Speaker 1: flying for the Air Force, helmets featured padding, air hoses
Speaker 1: to provide oxygen, radio connections for in flight communication, and
Speaker 1: visors to protect from sun and, if the worst should happen, debris.
Speaker 1: It's also a proud showpiece designed to flaunt prestige and
Speaker 1: attract new recruits to the Thunderbirds. While most standard issue
Speaker 1: Gentech's helmets are interchangeable, the Thunderbird's helmets are each custom
Speaker 1: painted with nicknames and team logos, then polished to a
Speaker 1: mirror shine. When Malachowski received her helmet at the end
Speaker 1: of training, it came with a note from the artist
Speaker 1: who decorated it. As Malachowski recalls, the note said, I've
Speaker 1: been polishing and designing these helmets for many Thunderbird teams.
Speaker 1: My young daughter never expressed any interest, but I told
Speaker 1: her this was for the first woman pilot, and she
Speaker 1: wanted to help me polish it. Malachowski knew what her
Speaker 1: joining the Thunderbirds might mean to future pioneers. It was
Speaker 1: never about me, she says. It's that a woman was
Speaker 1: doing it, and if she can dream big, any one
Speaker 1: can dream big. Why not blaze your own trail? Accompanying
Speaker 1: that article? Did you know what's the trail? A Thunderbird
Speaker 1: jet leaves? The famously dense jets of smoke that trail
Speaker 1: each Thunderbird come when pilots use a switch on the
Speaker 1: throttle to inject paraffin based smoke oil directly into the exhaust.
Speaker 1: When the oil hits the exhaust, it vaporizes and billows
Speaker 1: into the smoke that leaves spectators gaping. Finally, eating challenges
Speaker 1: are all the rage, But when was the last time
Speaker 1: you saw some one eat a mutton shoulder bone? Even
Speaker 1: before the Internet, over indulgence was something of a spectator
Speaker 1: sport for those who reveled in gastronomic glory by Sonya Andersen.
Speaker 1: Humans have long sought to turn gluttony into a virtue,
Speaker 1: leading to some remarkable episodes of competitive eating. Here are
Speaker 1: just a few. A hair raising appetite. In the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: an English farmer named Nicholas Wood was seen devouring sixty
Speaker 1: eggs and a quarter of a lamb. It was a
Speaker 1: routine meal for Wood, who was known as the great
Speaker 1: eater of Kent. According to the poet John Taylor, Wood
Speaker 1: once consumed seven dozen rabbits in one sitting, a feast
Speaker 1: tailor estimated would have fed one hundred and sixty eight soldiers.
Speaker 1: Whenever Wood ate publicly at fairs and festivals, nobles delighted
Speaker 1: in betting on his stomach. By the end of Wood's life,
Speaker 1: he had just one tooth left. He'd lost most of
Speaker 1: the others while eating an entire mutton, shoulder bones, and
Speaker 1: all dogged efforts. In May nineteen seventy two, Nathan's famous
Speaker 1: Coney Islands renowned hot dog restaurant held its first hot
Speaker 1: dog eating contest. Local competitors stepped up to swallow as
Speaker 1: many wieners in buns as they could in three and
Speaker 1: a half minutes, and a Brooklyn College student named Jason
Speaker 1: Scheckter won by downing fourteen dogs. In the half century since,
Speaker 1: standards have skyrocketed. The current record belongs to Joey Chestnut,
Speaker 1: who took home Nathan's coveted mustard belt in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: one after eating seventy six hot dogs and ten minutes.
Speaker 1: Chestnut's method is to break each dog in half, dunk
Speaker 1: the bun in water, and establish a rhythm meat bun, swallow, breathe.
Speaker 1: Weight of the union. The late nineteenth century began colorful
Speaker 1: associations formed on the basis of poundage, which became known
Speaker 1: as fat men's clubs. These groups disallowed any man under
Speaker 1: two hundred pounds and hosted celebratory weigh ins and socials. Unsurprisingly,
Speaker 1: the organization spent much of the dews they collected on food.
Speaker 1: At one meeting, the New England Fat Men's Club feasted
Speaker 1: on oysters, cream of chicken, soup, boiled snapper, beef with mushrooms,
Speaker 1: roasted chicken, roasted piglet, shrimp, salad, fruit pudding, cheesecake, and
Speaker 1: ice cream. When were the earliest American eating competitions. Some
Speaker 1: of the first took place in the eighteen seventies or
Speaker 1: eight This concludes readings from the Smithsonian magazine For to day,
Speaker 1: nor reader has been Rebecca Shore, Thank you for listening
Speaker 1: and have a great day.