Pizza, steak and 100 layers of lasagne: Inside the strange world of online competitive eating

Tanned, blonde, muscular Californian Erik Lamkin is what you might imagine to be the platonic ideal of a YouTube fitness influencer. But the content that’s brought him legions of fans, a line of merchandise and 3.1 million subscribers on the platform doesn’t focus on the gym; it focuses on feats of gargantuan eating.

In one of Lamkin’s most popular videos, with more than 17 million views, the 30-year-old consumes 100,000 calories over the course of 100 hours. He is one of the biggest names in the world of online competitive eating, an uncanny valley of online sideshows where creators push themselves – and their stomach capacities – to obscene physical limits in the name of content.

And the content is lucrative. Alongside Lamkin there’s also , (who goes by the handle Model vs Food) and the originator of overeating online content, Matt Stonie, whose most popular video sees him for an audience of 144 million viewers. Although this particular influencer industrial complex skews American – which makes sense, given that much of the US national identity is – there are competitive eating stars in the UK too; Leeds-based Adam Moran, aka BeardMeatsFood, has more than , and is matched by , “the UK’s most unlikely competitive eater”. And as TikTok has emerged as a, who describes his content as “aesthetics and lots of food”, walks 30,000 steps before heading to the office every day, and can consume 72 crumpets in a 24-hour period.