La Cabrera del Norte, Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires smells almost completely of grilled meat.  This is no exaggeration, the odour of grilled cow hits you almost as soon as you get off the motorway.  Steak is where it's at in BA and in most of Argentina in general.  Huge bits of meat are grilled over coal until they're blackened and crispy on the outside, the generous portion of fat they're generally cut with broken down and soft, but with the meat still rare or jugoso as the locals would say.  As you can imagine, there are a thousand different places to eat good steak in Buenos Aires, sadly I have been to nowhere near all, or half or one hundredth but I did go to a few.  So on that basis I'd like to share with you, which was my favourite and also the information that a steady diet of red meat two meals a day for two or three weeks will make you fat, sweaty and very tired.  Mmmm happy days!

Standing on the Shoulders of (Big Fat) Giants

'Movement and life are the cause of continuous wastage of substance in every living body; and the human body, that complicated machine, would soon break down if Providence had not equipped it with a device for warning it when its strength is no longer equal to its needs. This warning device is appetite '.

This is how Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin defines appetite in his classic The Physiology of Taste (1825. This translation is the Penguin Classics edition and is available here). He then rattles off some heroic feats of large appetite; a man that drank 8 bottles of wine everyday at breakfast, a friend who could eat a whole turkey, and another chum he watched polish off a soup with boiled beef, a large salad, a capon and a whole leg of mutton a la royale. The most impressive, in my opinion, was his lunch guest who managed to eat 3 or 4 dozen oysters. I have a friend who has a peculiar gluttony of his own that only really stretches to oysters and I'd be curious to see if he could manage this, some how I think probably not (though if he wants to try I think it would make for a great post).

But not to let the past outshine the present there is plenty of evidence of truly staggering feats of modern-day eating. The world hot-dog eating record currently stands at 59 in ten minutes, jointly held by Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut (US) and Takeru 'Tsunami' Kobayashi (Japan). There's also the 72oz Big Texan challenge and a list of finishers to go with it. So have all the great mountains of gluttony been climbed, apparently not. I came across this post that indicates a new Everest of greed here. Its good to know that there are still challenges out there.

(P.S. I wouldn't actually advocate anyone actually try and replicate any of the above feats, I think if I did my stomach would fall out).