[hoosier]

Eating contest draws crowd at Purdue's Shreve Hall

By Adam Hines
Staff Writer
All Brandon Knotts wanted was money to buy a couple cartons of Marlboro Reds, but he didn’t know he would have to eat a cow’s tongue to get it.
Monday night, a contest at Shreve Hall challenged residents to eat as many gross things as possible for a $60 Wal-Mart gift card.
To Pablo Trujillo, first-floor resident adviser and a senior in the School of Management, the reason for indulging in the delicacies was simple.
"Last semester we had all kinds of creepy, gross things; bugs and worms, we even had a goldfish," Trujillo said. "This semester we took it easy on them and made sure it was all dead and cooked."
Melissa Armstrong, the first-floor women’s RA explained the rules as the contestants filed in. The contest would be four rounds of increasing difficulty.
First the challengers ate two Twinkies as quickly as possible, moved on to a side of cow heart, washed it down with a shot of Tabasco sauce in the third round and polished off a plate of cow tongue to finish.
Armstrong, a senior in the College of Liberal Arts, said 10 people signed up to participate, but only four showed up.
But around 40 spectators were in attendance to watch three men and one woman compete to become the second winner of the challenge. They weren’t disappointed by the antics.
When the contestants saw the Twinkies, they seemed to laugh as if to say, "please, is this all?"
By the time the cow heart came out, the participants were down to three.
After the shots, only two remained.
When the tongue was unveiled, the last contestant dropped out leaving Knotts, a freshman in the College of Engineering, alone to complete the challenge.
The crowd was relentless, however, and demanded that he finish the tongue. He couldn’t.
After getting two bites into his mouth, it all came back up.
Trujillo, Knotts’ RA, was beside himself with laughter.
Benevolence showed through when the crowd decreed that if Knotts could stomach what was on his plate, the $60 would be his.
After six gags, Knotts swallowed the last of the tongue and won the $60.
His friends crowded around him to shower him with congratulations. He just smiled, because he then had the money to buy his two cartons of Marlboro Reds.
"The meat (from the heart) was awful, but the Tabasco made my mouth on fire," Knotts said. "I couldn’t stomach the tongue after that; the texture was just awful."