[Instrumental Intro]
[Intro]
Hey, kids.
I think we can all agree that there are few pastimes more grotesque than competitive eating.
The concept of a bunch of guys pushing their anatomy to its limits just for sport leaves a bad taste in my mouth, in more ways than one.
But imagine if these men didn't adopt this habit just for fun.
Imagine if some gross biological error forced them to eat like this for their entire life.
Introducing Tarrare.
[Who Was Tarrare?]
Tarrare was born in France around 1772 to a poor farming family.
It's said that his appetite was so voracious that, by his teens, Tarrare could еat an entire quarter of a cow carcass in a singlе day.
You'd think he'd be like mega-obese, but no, he only weighed 100 pounds by age 17.
However, there was still a few things that stood out about Tarrare appearance-wise.
For one, he had a huge, stretched-out mouth with horribly stained teeth.
He could reportedly fit twelve eggs in his cheeks at once, much like a chipmunk keeping its chipmunk eggs warm.
Additionally, when Tarrare was full, he'd get a crazy Octomom-gut going, and any other time he'd have a huge flap of stretched-out skin hangin' around his waist.
He also stank to high hell, even by 18th-century French peasant standards.
He was described as reeking, quote "to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces".
So between all this and his horrific outhouse-flooding dumps, his family had had enough.
(Mother): "Alright, you're eating us out of house and home here, you gotta go, man."
(Tarrare): "(dog-like whimpering)"
(Mother): "You heard me, kick bricks, froggy!"
(Video-Watcher 1): "Wow, he just called a French person a frog, that's so racist!"
(Video-Watcher 2): "No it's not. They're all French. The guy just looks like a frog, is all."
(Video-Watcher 1): "Oh. Well, too late, I'm already offended."
(Video Watcher 2): "That's fair. Dislike."
After leaving home, Tarrare was forced to beg and steal just to satisfy his gargantuan appetite.
Inevitably, people began to take notice of him, and eventually he landed a job as a street performer in Paris.
People would hand Tarrare entire baskets of apples, eggs, and even wine corks and watch in delight as he horked 'em down without the slightest hesitation.
Normally, this would go off without a hitch, except for one time when he suffered a severe intestinal blockage.
Fortunately, the crowd was kind enough to carry him to the hospital, where he was treated with the strongest laxatives the eighteenth century had to offer.
I would draw what happened next, but it would probably get my channel deleted, so let's just picture it for a few moments.
(Sam shudders)
Moving on.
Cut to the year 1792. This marks the beginning of "The War of the First Coalition".
Ever heard of it? Me neither. Who was in it? Fuckin' everyone.
Anyway, Tarrare decided to enlist in the war.
After all, maybe that profound emptiness he was feeling was just a lack of purpose in life.
Turns out, no, he really was psychotically hungry.
Even after being granted quadruple rations, Tarrare would still be diggin' through the trash pile whenever he got the chance.
After suffering extreme exhaustion, he was sent off to the military hospital in Soultz-Haut-Rhin.
The staff there were so dumbfounded by the man's abilities that they decided to keep him there to run a few experiments, the first of which involved putting Tarrare in a room with a meal prepared for fifteen people.
Naturally, he ate the entire thing and immediately fell asleep.
Next, they presented him with a raw eel.
In response, Tarrare crushed the eel's skull between his teeth before slurping down the entire creature in one go.
Now, this is hair-clenchingly horrifying for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, he put a whole frickin' eel in his stomach, but secondly, there had to be some point during digestion where the meat was gone but the bones still remained.
Now, for those of you who don't know, an eel skeleton looks like this.
That means Tarrare had all of those needle-sized ribs stabbing into the walls of his stomach at once, and he was fine!
He also ripped a live cat apart with his bare hands, drank its blood, and ate everything but its bones and then later gagged up the fur and skin like an owl, but y'know, that's neither here nor there.
(Doctor): "After viewing our data, I've come to the scientific conclusion that uhh... yeah, we got a goddamn demon on our hands."
But as we all know, with great devour comes great responsibility.
Since Tarrare was still technically enlisted, the military decided to utilize his abilities for the greater good.
(General): "Hey Tarrare, it's me, the general. Listen, could you eat this box with a note in it for me?"
(Tarrare): "Hmmm..."
(General): "If you do it, we'll give you a wheelbarrow full of bull organs."
(Tarrare): "Hoh!"
Lo and behold, two days later he passed the container in mint condition and was given his reward as promised.
With this proof of concept, they made him an official spy and sent him into Prussia with a document in his belly, to be delivered to an imprisoned French colonel.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of things Tarrare couldn't do that are generally important when sneaking into another country.
A. He couldn't speak German
and B. It's pretty hard to maintain a low profile when you're running around like a madman wolfing down garbage and mutilating small animals.
So he ended up being captured by the enemy.
Initially, he kept his mouth shut (for once), but after a whipping and a day in jail, Tarrare gave in.
After confessing that he did, in fact, have vital intelligence snaking its way through his GI track, the Prussians chained him to a latrine until the box emerged 30 hours later.
The note wasn't actually anything important, so they just mock-executed him, give him a severe beating, and sent him on his way.
After all that, Tarrare returned to life at the hospital, desperate for a cure for his condition, but nothing they ever tried worked. Meanwhile, the man's endless hunger continued to get him into all sorts of trouble.
He'd often sneak out of the hospital to eat the scraps behind the local butcher and fight stray dogs in the alley for their precious garbage.
He'd also seek out patients undergoing bloodletting in order to take all their life juice for himself.
On several occasions, he was even caught attempting to eat bodies in the mortuary.
By this point in my research, I was so desensitized to this guy that I didn't even bat an eye when I first read that.
I was just like "all right, guess he must have been hungry."
Anyway, the hospital staff begrudgingly tolerated Tarrare's buffoonery until one day when he went too far.
(Doctor): "Well, Tarrare, you've only had three mess hall raids, four miscellaneous trash-related mishaps, and one cadaver defiling. So I'd say so far, this week's been pretty good."
(Nurse): "Doctor, we should probably inform you that a 14-month-old child has gone missing from their room."
(Doctor): "Tarrare, look at me. Did you eat a fucking baby?"
[Ending]
Tarrare was promptly kicked out of the hospital and spent four years out and about doing, you know, whatever horrific shit you can imagine. When he came back, he was suffering from advanced tuberculosis and died shortly after arrival. During his autopsy, the surgeons found that when they looked into his mouth, they could see all the way down his throat and into his stomach cavity. As you can imagine, his whole abdominal region was profoundly deformed. Basically, if this is a normal human, this is what they found inside Tarrare. Just like the man's mind, we can see that around 90% is devoted towards food and 10% towards everything else.
[Outro]
So, moral of the story here is that- no, you know what? Not even I can find anything resembling a moral here. Not all stories have a point to them. Sometimes they're just sad and disgusting from beginning to end. And now a word from our sponsor.
[Outro]
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