SHEBOYGAN, WI--After gorging on a record 58 bratwurst at the Johnsonville World Bratwurst Eating Championship on Saturday, professional eater Takeru Kobayashi was formally awarded the title of World’s Most Disgusting Person.

Kobayashi, saliva dribbling down his chin and chunks of bratwurst sticking to the front of his shirt, accepted the award from a representative of the Johnsonville Bratwurst Company.

“I am very honored to be named World’s Most Disgusting Person,” he said through a translator. “I consumed 58 bratwurst in just 10 minutes. I stuffed them in my mouth 4 at a time until my cheeks bulged out like big fat balloons and then swallowed them down into my belly where they distributed pork fat and other poisons throughout my body. Whoa, hold on a second. That didn’t feel right. That fluttering in my chest. Wait...Okay, its gone. Anyway, I won $8000.”

As a reward for winning the prestigious title, Kobayashi was also given a lifetime supply of Johnsonville Bratwurst and a monogrammed towel to wipe his disgusting face with. But he’s not satisfied just yet. Kobayashi hopes to return next year and eat 60 bratwurst's.

“60 bratwurst are in my sight,” he proclaimed. “Once I eat 60 I will be immortalized. Then I will try and eat 70, then 80, and so on. I’ve eaten several pigs worth of bratwurst already. Why do I do all this? I don’t know. When you find something you’re good at, you do it. I’m good at force feeding myself meat byproducts. Tiger Woods is good at golf. So you see, we are very much alike.”

Kobayashi is widely regarded as the greatest competitive eater in the world, having won Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest six years in a row. On July 4, 2006, he set a record by consuming 53 hot dog in 12 minutes, one of the most disgusting accomplishments in human history.

“When Kobayashi ate those 53 hot dogs, it was both impressive and horrifying,” said George T. Hunt, president of the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFCE). “That’s a short amount of time to eat so many hot dogs, and it does take an incredible amount of discipline and training, but you can’t avoid the fact that it’s gross. Just watching the guy do it ruined my appetite for weeks, and I once ate 12 apple pies in one sitting. Of course that took over an hour. I’m not some kind of glutton.”

Kobayashi also owns the record for eating cow brains (57 in 15 minutes), hamburgers (69 in 8 minutes) and rice balls (20 pounds in 30 minutes.) Of all the foods, he says cow brains were the most disgusting.

“I am most proud of my cow brain record because they were the most disgusting,” Kobayashi said. “They are extremely slimy and wet and sticky, and they melt in your mouth and sort of ooze down your throat. When I ate those, even I had to question what I was doing with my life. But then I thought about all the people in the world who had no food at all, and I felt a lot better. That always makes me feel better for some reason.”

Critics of competitive eating say the sport is not only grossly unhealthy to the participants, but offensive to the millions of starving people around the world. Representatives from the IFCE and Nathan’s Hot Dogs disagree.

Said Nathan’s chairman Douglas Petersen: “These contests are perfectly safe. These are trained professional eaters who know how to prepare their bodies and recover afterward. Also, we at Nathan’s donate tens of thousands of hot dogs a year to food banks across America to feed starving people. Imagine starving like that and then sucking down 4 or 5 hot dogs? Yikes. That might kill you right there. Either way, we’re tackling the hunger problem.”

  Copyright 2006, The Brushback - Do not reprint without permission. This article is satire and is not intended as actual news.

Copyright 2005, The Brushback - Do not reprint without permission. This article is satire and is not intended as actual news.