7 Intense Food Challenges We’re Not Sure if We’d Try
These food challenges aren’t for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.Food challenges, such as the gallon challenge or the saltine cracker challenge, are specific challenges or competitions involving food.[1] Milk chugging is a popular competitive eating challenge on college campuses, and was promoted by MTV’s Jackass in the late 1990s.[2][3]
With the rise of the Internet, Internet phenomena have increasingly spread through chain emails, YouTube, and social media, encouraging people to “challenge” their friends by spreading the message to others, as well as creating viral Internet memes.
Some “challenges” on the internet can seriously harm participants. The cinnamon challenge, a dare to attempt to eat a specified amount of ground cinnamon within a minute, has a strong risk of people gagging on cinnamon inhaled into the lungs.[4] In July 2015, a four-year-old boy died of asphyxiation after ingesting cinnamon.[5]Competitive eating, or speed eating, is an activity in which participants compete against each other to eat large quantities of food, usually in a short time period. Contests are typically eight to ten minutes long, although some competitions can last up to thirty minutes, with the person consuming the most food being declared the winner. Competitive eating is most popular in the United States, Canada, and Japan, where organized professional eating contests often offer prizes, including cash.Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word football normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly called football include association football (known as soccer in North America, Ireland and Australia); gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football); Australian rules football; rugby union and rugby league; and Gaelic football.[1] These various forms of football share to varying extents common origins and are known as “football codes”.
There are a number of references to traditional, ancient, or prehistoric ball games played in many different parts of the world.[2][3][4] Contemporary codes of football can be traced back to the codification of these games at English public schools during the 19th century.[5][6] The expansion and cultural influence of the British Empire allowed these rules of football to spread to areas of British influence outside the directly controlled Empire.[7] By the end of the 19th century, distinct regional codes were already developing: Gaelic football, for example, deliberately incorporated the rules of local traditional football games in order to maintain their heritage.[8] In 1888, The Football League was founded in England, becoming the first of many professional football associations. During the 20th century, several of the various kinds of football grew to become some of the most popular team sports in the world.
While football continued to be played in various forms throughout Britain, its public schools (equivalent to private schools in other countries) are widely credited with four key achievements in the creation of modern football codes. First of all, the evidence suggests that they were important in taking football away from its “mob” form and turning it into an organised team sport. Second, many early descriptions of football and references to it were recorded by people who had studied at these schools. Third, it was teachers, students, and former students from these schools who first codified football games, to enable matches to be played between schools. Finally, it was at English public schools that the division between “kicking” and “running” (or “carrying”) games first became clear.
The earliest evidence that games resembling football were being played at English public schools – mainly attended by boys from the upper, upper-middle and professional classes – comes from the Vulgaria by William Herman in 1519. Herman had been headmaster at Eton and Winchester colleges and his Latin textbook includes a translation exercise with the phrase “We wyll playe with a ball full of wynde”.[51]
Richard Mulcaster, a student at Eton College in the early 16th century and later headmaster at other English schools, has been described as “the greatest sixteenth Century advocate of football”.[52] Among his contributions are the earliest evidence of organised team football. Mulcaster’s writings refer to teams (“sides” and “parties”), positions (“standings”), a referee (“judge over the parties”) and a coach “(trayning maister)”. Mulcaster’s “footeball” had evolved from the disordered and violent forms of traditional football:
ome smaller number with such overlooking, sorted into sides and standings, not meeting with their bodies so boisterously to trie their strength: nor shouldring or shuffing one an other so barbarously … may use footeball for as
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