Limeat Inc.: Furious Pete and the Post-Colonial Hamburger Standard

Abstract

Competitive and speed eating by now constitute a mainstay in contemporary food culture. This paper outlines an emergent consumptive trend that radiates through Furious Pete’s, a popular professional speed eater, post-colonial omnivorous ethos that is tagged ‘limeating’, denoting eating to the limit or eating the limit. By drawing on the key distinction between drives and desire, I argue that the cultural phenomenon of limeating eludes and at the same time buttresses consumptive desire, while inviting the limeater’s audience to a regressive path to unbound orality, coupled with an indiscriminate will-to-introjection. Furious Pete is shown to be instituting a new hamburger standard which, contrary to the established Big Mac Index, does not concern the relative pricing of Big Mac across cultures, but the annihilation of differentially valorized gastronomic offerings in the face of cannibalistic drives.