How you can stomach it

Too much food for thought is never a bad thing… but what about too much food, asks NURY VITTACHI

“An alligator can eat a quarter of its bodyweight in a single meal, equivalent to a human eating 89 bowls of rice,” a reader told me in an electronic conversation.

I was not impressed. Ever seen teenagers eat? Eighty-nine bowls is just the appetiser. This exchange was triggered by a March 3 news report that a snake in Florida was seen eating a deer larger than itself. The snake became a new Dining Hero for my son and me, replacing TV’s Miss Piggy, whose sensible eating plan is: “Never eat anything you cannot lift.”

So how did the snake eat something larger than it? Snakes temporarily dislocate their upper and lower jaws so that they can eat big things, including cows and buffaloes, said a herpetologist friend via email. (Humans have to do the same when eating those extra-tall burgers.)

A bird-lover in my office commented that some songbirds eat a meal of insects roughly every two seconds during their waking hours. That’s 30 meals a minute!

Definitely worth adding them to our Dining Heroes list.

Listening to this conversation was a colleague who was on a diet where you have six small meals a day. (I told her I totally loved the sound of that, except for the word “small”.)

The discussion became a competition. “Forget alligators. A growing hummingbird consumes twice its weight in food every single day,” the bird-lover said. Impressive. In human terms, that would be equivalent to a teenaged boy eating a couple of sheep a day. Could teens really do that? I texted one to ask. “If you put them on a pizza, or cooked them as rogan josh, sure,” was his reply (after translation from teenspeak).

But hang on, you say, would that not be dangerous? I asked a doctor friend, and he said that physicians used to think it was impossible to eat yourself to death. But in 1985, medical journal The Lancet reported a case in which a 23-year-old woman consumed one pound (450 grams) of liver,