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Coast Salish eating contests were as personal as the ones Jacobs entered. The difference is that only one person or one team ate, and it was always the guests. The object was, literally, to eat the host out of house and home. Drop by my house at the right time, and this could take less than 15 minutes – which was of course, the point. The eater�s boast: �My power can consume everything you own.� The host�s implicit reply: �I am so rich, I have so much food, that I can feed your eating power until it can�t eat any more��which is a serious malfunction in an eating power.

�All of a man�s property and his wives and children might be forfeit if he lost in such a situation,� writes Marian Wesley Smith, in her 1940 ethnographic study The Puyallup-Nisqually. Smith notes that it was not just the amount of food eaten that was extraordinary, but the style with which it was eaten: �After consuming the food and while eating, the person showed no extra puffiness nor bunches on his body or under his clothes.�

So when three old men came to challenge one of Smith�s informants at a feast, they talked and joked among themselves as they ate four entire meals apiece. They stopped short when he still had a half a side of beef left, and blamed their defeat on the watermelon he�d served for dessert. Too much water. Three years later, they came back for a return match. After an entire yearling steer, potatoes, rice, beans, bread, and fruit, they conceded defeat. There is no record of what, if anything, they lost.

Then there�s the story of the old man who, in his youth, had boasted of his eating power around some white settlers. When challenged, he sat down and ate two sides of beef�a cow, in other words�and washed it down with a barrel of water. �They were satisfied,� Smith�s informant says.

I would have been more nervous than satisfied watching a man of normal size eat a cow�calmly, chewing well as he went, possibly making jokes and taking side bets, showing no signs of discomfort. The barrel of water I can accept, somehow. But where did the cow go? The Puyallup-Nisqually people who talked to Smith in the 1930s would have said that the man�s power ate the cow. That�s at least as reasonable as the idea that it all fit in his stomach. Of course, physics tells us that the cow and the man are both just collections of atoms, which is to say tiny bits of matter and a whole lot of empty space.

Maybe Coast Salish power eaters knew some way to restructure the food so it became immensely compact. Maybe not. But if a cow disappears into a man, and the man does not blow up, like Mr. Creosote in Monty Python�s The Meaning of Life, then I, for one, would like an explanation. If it isn�t the stomach, what gives?