If your nickname is ‘Silo’, you’d better be for real. Chances are you’re a flyover countryman, because they don’t store grain in Brooklyn. Or you’re a military man, because they don’t keep the nukes beneath grandma’s backyard.
Or you’re this kid named Eric Dahl.
“So I was trying to take down the baker’s dozen omelet in Red Wing, Minn., and people had done it before. But you had an hour to do it, and the old record was 45 minutes or something like that. So I go in, and I’m doing it, and my friends are filming it for me, and the guy behind me goes, ‘Oh, he’s gonna do it!’ And this old lady with this look of uncertainty on her face just says, ‘Yeah, but look at his body structure — he’s like a silo!'”
Eric ‘Silo’ Dahl is a senior computer engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who eats like it’s his job, because well, it sort of is. The lean ex-football player chows for All Pro Eating Promotions, a competitive eating league that bills itself as “the world’s only Independent Competitive Eating organization”, not binding its talent to agreements or contracts and opening its events to all comers. Apologies to Randy Johnson — he is, by any league measure, The Big Storage Unit.
His ranking: third overall, formerly number one.
His records: 6 pounds of burrito in less than 3 and a half minutes; nearly 25 chicken sliders in 8 minutes; 37 — 37! — lobster rolls in 8 minutes; 9 and a half pounds of some gelatinous Nordic fishy stuff called lutefisk in 6 minutes; 3 and three-quarters pecan pies in 7 minutes; 10 and a half pulled pork sandwiches in 6 minutes; 27 and a half Tex Mex rolls in 8 minutes; and an indeterminate number of antacids in however-many minutes.
His purpose: now that may be the most striking thing of all. Dahl said that while he’s held a summer job or internship each year of college, the self-realization that he could be a winner in these contests — after about five or six times out, he said — gave him the opportunity to “[eat] for his education”.
“This kind of came along, and I really started pursuing it because it was an avenue for me to compete in,” Dahl said, who began his career of shock-and-awing his hunger hormones in 2011. “I’m a very competitive person, and I push it to the limit in a lot of things that I do. It combined a lot of my hobbies like filmmaking and eating and competing in events into one, and money came along with it.”
(Yes, filmmaking. Check out his YouTube page.)
Dahl has earned more than $18,000 in prize money or merchandise, the Wisconsin State-Journal reported, and the frequency and purses of All Pro Eating events give top competitors like him a shot at top winnings. Four events between the ends of August and September, for instance, offered first-place prizes between $800 and $1,000.
Though the money is good for a college student — heck, great, and famously earned — Dahl plans to make a living with the degree for which he’s studied, worked, and devoured a tonnage of meat. He’s set to begin a job with Texas Instruments after he graduates in December.
He will depart school leaving some advice for aspiring eaters and college students looking to make a buck or thousands, however: to the former, avoid food items coated heavily in mayo, and to the latter, get creative in seeking ways to help foot the bill for higher education.
“Always be thinking. There’s always an opportunity to find something new or find an interesting way to generate an income stream.”
Silo is proof.
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(Eric Dahl on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ericsilodahl)
