Edit: here's a picture of pizza https://i.redd.it/v5bgqgkzzqv91.jpg

A friend of mine recently attempted a pizza-eating challenge at a local Italian restaurant. The store sells rectangular pizza that is 200mm (8in) wide, and is sold in linear increments of 250mm (10in) or 6 slices.

The store has a challenge of eating a 1 metre (39in) length of pizza - 24 slices.

• If the pizza is consumed in under 45 minutes, the victor wins a t-shirt.
• If the pizza could be eaten in under 30 minutes, the pizza would also be free.
• The owner was feeling particularly generous (or confident) that day, and also offered a $100 cash prize for the 30 minute target.

The data was collected by recording the time measured by a restaurant-supplied stopwatch after each of the 24 pizza slices was fully consumed. Elapsed time was recorded in a spreadsheet app on a smartphone. The graph was plotted using Matplotlib in a Python Notebook. Energy contained within the pizza was approximated by back-calculating the nutritional information of a similarly topped fast-food pizza into a unit rate of energy per area, and then applying that to the area of the pizza.

After 14.5 slices, he admitted defeat and called it.

Did your friend do any kind of preparation for this at all?

He skipped lunch, but that's about all. What he brought to the party was misplaced confidence!

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I think you just plotted marginal utility and the law of diminishing returns lol. The Pizza Logarithm theory seems to hold true.

I cannot follow your math here. From your explanation it seems the whole pizza is only 200mm wide. Each "slice" is 250mm long - so to eat "one meter" one would have to eat either 5 slices (to measure by width) or 4 slices (to measure by length).

The 250mm increments are actually 6 slices, so each rectangular slice must only be about 4cm wide, 20cm long

I thought I was looking at the current-voltage plot of a MOSFET (I'm biased like that)... Your friend reached saturation, but it was very linear in the first minutes.

Apologies for the confusion, each 'single serve' of pizza is 250mm long cut 3-by-2 = 6 slices. The metre pizza is effectively 4 of these end-on-end (cooked as 2x500mm lengths due to oven limitations).

Hopefully below picture gives context. https://i.redd.it/v5bgqgkzzqv91.jpg

We were extrapolating as he ate and we were very excited for the first 10 minutes or so but it decayed quickly!

Thanks, it's clearer now. I hope your friend is well.

You mean there are professional eaters?

Yes. They compete in eating competitions

24 slices huh , I would def puke

Crazy how its pretty much a perfect log

It doesn’t look that big in the photo but assuming 250mm serving is equal to one average pizza then that’s like 4 pizzas? He did great first 500mm the he hit the wall

I was imagining big round circular pizza, like god intended it to be.

This seems a lot more doable (but tbh I hate rectangular pizzas because it's not always disclosed in some restaurants)

As opposed to much of the 'data' on this subreddit this is a beautifully-presented chart showing multiple items of data. Thanks for sharing.

Yes, there’s a professional hotdog eating contest every year for example.

Thanks so much for the kind feedback

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Makes you wonder if he would have done any better at a slower pace, or if he would just have reached capacity at the same point anyway...

yeah

matt stonie and joey chestnut are the most popular

I'm sure it turned into a perfect log the next day.

Top tier comment, I wish I could give you more karma

OP ate around 3000 calories before giving up. I'd say that's pretty well done.

You got us in the first part with 0.5m in 15 mins, second part was harder for sure

You hate it because it is not always disclosed? Why the hate?

Less pizza. If I knew I was getting a worse deal, I might've just skipped on it.

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Wouldn't a square pizza actually be more pizza given the same diameter?

I think that skipping lunch might actually be a mistake because it makes your stomach shrink since it's empty - not that it would have made a difference here. As far as i know competitive eaters sometimes prepare for contests by chugging a bunch of water to expand the stomach beforehand.

There's a place near mine that sells an 18" square pizza for £2 less than a 20" round pizza.

If it were square, but a rectangular pizza can surprise you with any width. I know I was surprised when a 12" was like 8 inch wide. I wasn't too amused.

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Ah, true.

Reminds me of an idealized stress-strain curve, specifically one for concrete. Thankfully he stopped before he reached rupture strain.

You see at 10mins is where he made a mistake

Now that looks tasty, at least he saved you some

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Yes. The surface area of a square is d^2. The surface area of a circle is pi/4 times the surface area of that square (so, pi/4×d^2). Pi/4 is roughly 78%, so you would get 22% pizza less.

Probably would have eaten less if he ate more slowly. There’s signal lag between when your body gets full and when it tells your brain this information. The slower you eat, the less lag there is between consumption and satiety signals to the brain. That’s why a lot of weight loss advise is “drink more water throughout the day” and “drink 20 oz of water 20 minutes before a meal”. It goes in the tank and sits there long enough for you to register it’s there.

Yup! I am a person who looovvvves food but has a frustratingly small appetite. When I went to Vegas for the first time I did research beforehand on how to eat more food at the buffet lol. I spent about a week gearing up for it by eating many grazing meals through the day trying to train my stomach to expand. It was a lot of work just to ensure I got my best value at the buffet. 10/10 would do it again though

That's a lot of shit to go through for a T shirt.

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Man wheres Beard Meats Food when you need him

One of my favorite posts in this sub. Clean and clear. Beautiful and interesting data.

At least it was for a noble cause - pizza.

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Really more of a shitpost. Maybe an upper decker though.

In the competitive eating world, is weed viewed as a performance enhancing drug?

Could you go for something less calorific and filling like Margherita? Or does it have to be that pizza?

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And a few deaths from the hotdog eating contest, too.

i bet one of those mukbang streamers who eat 3 dozen eggs and huge pots of ramen could have done it

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> two pizzas

Two pizzas of what size though? You realize two 8 inch pizzas is smaller than a 12 inch. Also definitely depends on how much toppings was on the pizza.

Pizza fingers

Now I understand it, but pizza is almost always defined by area not length. Had you multiplied by the width it would be much clearer how much pizza was consumed.

Unlock a new kink: https://www.instagram.com/shutkeverofficial/?hl=fr

BeardMeetsFood, KatinaEatsKilos, Randy Santel are 3 youtube channels who make their living doing food challenges

The whole pizza is about 0.00004943 acres. His friend consumed 0.00002965 acres of pizza.

Mmmm, pizza pi.

Interestingly, the fact that I have no idea what a mm/meter of pizza means delayed my understanding of almost every other aspect of the graph by about a minute. I’d drop the length axes and change energy to calories.

I think "Pizza consumed (mm)" has to be the single best axis label I've seen in my life

Did you feel it helped substantially after all that work? Or was it more or less normal?

15 seconds of research shows that a simple large pizza from dominos is about 2,000 calories. That makes this challenge equal to 10 pizzas. That seems wrong to me. Thoughts?

Edit: using 2,000 KCalories = 8,000 KJoules, we get 2.5 large dominos pizzas.

The full pizza is equivalent to about a 20 inch pizza, for us circle people. His 14.5 slices here is closer to about a 15 inch pizza consumed, or about 1.5 store bought frozen pizzas.

This is the best post i've seen on here in ages, thanks op!

A surprising amount of organic related statistics fall under logs and bell curves.

You need to convert from kilojoules to calories

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What is 1 meter of pizza ?

How is it measured ?

Same. My only problem with this is the units. Needs to be a mass, volume, or at least an area (we can assume thickness)!

20k kj is roughly 4.7k calories. It's a lot but very doable I think for the right person. This clearly isn't in the United States.

Cheers, I appreciate the feedback. It's a difficult concept to convey pizza as a linear unit, especially when most people intuitively think of pizza as an 11-ish inch diameter circle cut into 8 slices. In hindsight, keeping the headline '1 metre of pizza' but using number of slices as the primary axis.

As for energy, I wasn't quite thinking of global appeal when I made it. Kilojoules is standard for energy and is on product labels, though calories is understood. Perhaps I could have added ticks to the other side of the energy axis in Cal at the risk of clutter.

Thanks so much!

Thanks so much for the kind words!

Millimeters of pizza is an odd metric.

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Unfortunately it had to be the special of the restaurant.

For those playing at home: Tomato base, cheese, salami, bacon, parmesan and basil pesto

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8in * 39in = 312 in^(2) of pizza. Converting to a round pizza, that's just about 10in radius (10^(2) * 3.14) = 314 in^(2). So that's one 20 inch diameter pizza in 30 or 40 minutes. How often is the challenge completed? Doesn't seem that impossible.

It absolutely helped. I managed to clear four platefuls and 8 beers. At home I’m a one-meal-a-day gal.

Edit: the beers were those half sized plastic glasses and they were piss cheap American beer included in the cost of the buffet. Not buzz-worthy in the slightest.

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Keep in mind the $100 was thrown in by the boss on the day who had obviously sized up the competitor and taken a punt that he wouldn't make it.

The owner did say that quite a few people actually complete it, but he has made a lot more money out of people attempting the challenge and failing than free pizza given away.

Depends on how they are measuring the "diameter" of the square pizza. If they are measuring the diagonal of the square, it would be a smaller area than a circular pizza of the same diameter.

What's that in square parsecs?

Oof the salami + bacon makes that much more difficult. Not that eating a sq meter of pizza isn’t already ridiculous lol

They eat lbs of grapes the night before

You know for a split second I wondered if calories weren’t universal. I actually didn’t know it wasn’t. I should have realized that if they were, nobody would suddenly opt for kJ.

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2 12 inch pizzas is still crazy in one setting. Damn that is like $60 worth of pizza. lol

The result would have been messy to say the least

Wouldn’t it be better to plot this versus the surface of pizza?

Unless I misread it, it's not a square meter. The pizza is 200mm wide and 250mm long increments. The competition was to eat four of these sections, which would have been a meter long total but still only 200mm wide.

Yeah, that seems way too easy. Seems like just one family size pizza

> I thought I was looking at the current-voltage plot of a MOSFET (I'm biased like that)...

Pun intended?

Never tried one-dimentional pizza.

I've eaten an 18" diameter pizza before. I could 100% do this challenge if I prepared a little bit. And I'm not a competitive eater or anything crazy, just a guy who likes to test how much he can eat sometimes.

If the line goes down he would be throwing up..?🤮🤢

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man that sounds good as hell

I see the issue, you stopped eating.

Can you share the Code to generate this graph? Maybe dm if you want

That’s not that much pizza , I could do that

Even like 6/7 mins you can see the beginning of a re-assessment lol.

20 000 kJ is only 4 780 kcal

EZ

So probably it's the spicyness

A wafer thin mint mister Creosote?

Or in other words 0.2 square meters, aka 2000 square centimetres, or 2.22 square feet.

This IS reddit 😀

12 slices in 15 mins is impressive. Suicidal, but impressive.

Makes sense, thanks!

Nah the trick is to mix with liquid and swallow it all as quickly as you can before your brain tells you to stop eating

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Michaelis–Menten kinetics apparently are not just for enzymes.... should call this person "pizza-ase"

That depends on what measurement you use for the size of the square pizza. Measuring corner to corner gets you a very different number than measuring edge length.

So like a twenty inch round pizza

I watched on YouTube once a competitive eater, eating Happy Meals until he got all the possible Pokémon cards they were doing, as a challenge.

That dude went through like 20 meals from what I recall. How do they do it??

I love food, but become full so fast. Which is to my disappointment, because I usually push the limits and try to eat a bit more even when I'm full.

12” by 8” makes it approximately the same area as a circular 12” pizza

Edit: added “approximately”. I found a pizza place stating their 12” pizza was 96square inches. And then made my comment. Then i did the math. So either they have rectangular pizza or their 12“ isn’t 12”. Either way I did the math to double check and it’s definitely slightly smaller than a 12” round pizza which has 113.1sq inches.

Good deal. The square one is slightly bigger for less money!

Round (12 diameter) : (12/2)^2 * pi =~ 113
Rectangle (12x8) : 12 * 8 = 96
It's smaller by about 15%

Just got my edit in about 30s before your reply… lol

lol, you also made me calculate again, like did I make an error or something, better check again.

Thinking about it now, 15% less is as if someone stole a whole slice (assuming 8 pizza slices which is pretty common) and then took a bite out of a 2nd slice.

Kinda looks like a sigmoid curve, it appears in exponential processes that are limited by some finite resource (the size of your friends stomach).

The initial growth is admitedly more linear than exponential.

Here you go! Apologies for the uncommented spaghetti code.

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

pizzasplit=pd.read_csv(r'D:\Downloads\pizza time splits - Sheet1.csv')

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6),dpi=150)

xlim=45.5
ylim=1005

pizzasplit['Elapsed time']=pizzasplit['Elapsed time'].map(lambda x: pd.to_timedelta(x).seconds/60)

plt.scatter(pizzasplit['Elapsed time'],pizzasplit.Millimetres,color='b')
plt.plot(pizzasplit['Elapsed time'],pizzasplit.Millimetres,color='b')
ax.axhline(1000,color='r',xmax=45/xlim)
ax.axhline(604,color='b',xmin=36.91/xlim,xmax=45/xlim)
plt.text(22.5, 1000, '1 metre of pizza', fontsize=12, va='center', ha='center', backgroundcolor='w')
plt.text(37, 620, 'Defeat', fontsize=12, va='baseline', ha='left')

ax.axvline(30,color='g',ymax=1000/ylim)
ax.axvline(45,color='g',ymax=1000/ylim)
plt.text(29.5, 30, 'Time limit for free pizza + $100', fontsize=10, va='bottom', ha='center', rotation=90)
plt.text(44.5, 30, 'Time limit for commemorative t-shirt', fontsize=10, va='bottom', ha='center', rotation=90)

x=np.arange(0, 31, 1)
y=1000*x/30
plt.plot(x,y,color='g',linestyle='dashed',alpha=0.4)

x=np.arange(0, 46, 1)
y=1000*x/45

plt.plot(x,y,color='g',linestyle='dashed',alpha=0.4)

plt.xticks(np.arange(0, 46, step=5))
plt.yticks(np.arange(0, 1001, step=250))
plt.xlim(0,xlim)
plt.ylim(0,ylim)
ax.spines['right'].set_visible(False)
ax.spines['top'].set_visible(False)

ax.grid(linestyle="--", linewidth=0.5, color='.25', alpha=0.3, zorder=-10)

plt.xlabel('Elapsed time (minutes)')
plt.ylabel('Pizza consumed (mm)')

def make_patch_spines_invisible(ax):
    ax.set_frame_on(True)
    ax.patch.set_visible(False)
    for sp in ax.spines.values():
        sp.set_visible(False)

fig.subplots_adjust(right=0.75)

par1 = ax.twinx()
par2 = ax.twinx()

# Offset the right spine of par2.  The ticks and label have already been
# placed on the right by twinx above.
par1.spines["right"].set_position(("axes", 1.02))
par2.spines["right"].set_position(("axes", 1.15))
# Having been created by twinx, par2 has its frame off, so the line of its
# detached spine is invisible.  First, activate the frame but make the patch
# and spines invisible.
make_patch_spines_invisible(par2)
# Second, show the right spine.
par2.spines["right"].set_visible(True)
par1.spines['top'].set_visible(False)

par1.set_ylim(0, (ylim/1000)*max(pizzasplit.Slices))
par2.set_ylim(0, (ylim/1000)*max(pizzasplit.kJ))

par1.set_yticks(np.arange(0, 25, step=4))

par1.set_ylabel("Slices")
par2.set_ylabel("Energy (kJ)")

tkw = dict(size=4, width=1.5)
ax.tick_params(axis='y', **tkw)
par1.tick_params(axis='y', **tkw)
par2.tick_params(axis='y', **tkw)
ax.tick_params(axis='x', **tkw)

plt.tight_layout()

Data input CSV file below

kJ,Millimetres,Slices,Elapsed time
0,0,0,00:00:00
728.5,41.66666667,1,00:01:04
1457,83.33333333,2,00:02:08
2185.5,125,3,00:02:50
2914,166.6666667,4,00:03:38
3642.5,208.3333333,5,00:04:37
4371,250,6,00:05:15
5099.5,291.6666667,7,00:06:04
5828,333.3333333,8,00:07:03
6556.5,375,9,00:08:28
7285,416.6666667,10,00:10:08
8013.5,458.3333333,11,00:12:28
8742,500,12,00:15:41
9470.5,541.6666667,13,00:21:30
10199,583.3333333,14,00:28:52
10563.25,604.1666667,14.5,00:36:55
11656,666.6666667,16,
12384.5,708.3333333,17,
13113,750,18,
13841.5,791.6666667,19,
14570,833.3333333,20,
15298.5,875,21,
16027,916.6666667,22,
16755.5,958.3333333,23,
17484,1000,24,

What a splendid pie, pizza-pizza pie

Every minute, every second, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy

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I was just going to go with an inverse log with some modifiers, but guess it has a name.

Thought this was a lag curve for a bailey card

When nutitionists talk about calories (sometime written as capital-C Calories), they're referring to kilocalories.

2000 food Calories = 2000 kcal ≈ 8000 kJ.

Even if you win you are literally gonna gain 5 pounds of fat for a t-shirt.. NOT WORTH

Yeah that sounds right.

Jesus fucking Christ. Eating challenges are a horrible concept. They are encouraging something so deeply unhealthy and harmful.

Thank you for all your replies. I never knew.

It's about sending a message.

Wow, your dedication is impressive. Username checks out

Obviously, yes.

Thank you!