Children Eat Much Ice-Cream

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 28, 4 December 1950, Page 3

Children Eat Much Ice-Cream

Twenty Auckland children were paid a guinea each recently to eat as much ice cream as they could hold and no casualties were reported. The human body can stand a great deal more than an orgy of ice cream. In fact two Oxford undergraduates proved it when one ate 17 beef steaks and the other 23.

Their feeling of discomfort was caused purely by the food, but other folk have tried to see just how uncomfortable they could be while eating. Gymnasts tried to reach the pinnacle of discomfort by eating a meal while standing on their hands. They stood on one hand and fed with the other. The food went up, not down. The blood rushed to their head. All competitors were completely exhausted when the meal was over. On another occasion 15 children ate while lying flat on their stomachs and with their hands tied behind their backs. Food in a plate was placed in front of them; the first to finish won a prize.

It is wonderful what folk will do for a prize. In America two veteran iron workers had a four-course meal while sitting on a girder of a building under construction. A table was placed across the girder. They afterward said that in spite of the quality of the food they did not enjoy their meal. This seems to indicate that environment as well as the food plays a large part in the enjoyment of a meal. Mere bulk is no criterion, and one wonders if any useful information arose from the recent ice cream tests. After all, Mr Darrel McAtee, of lowa, managed to eat at one sitting 15 large hamburger sandwiches, five bottles of lemonade and several glasses of water. It took him four hours, thus beating by two hamburger sandwiches the previous record. This suggests that thei’e is somebody somewhere ready to do anything, however useless. The only thing that it proves- is that the second helping is never as nice as the first.