THE BET

Big shout out to my buddy Eric “Brown Chicken” Day for having recently finished hiking the ENTIRE Appalachian Trail. Ask yourself what you have been doing for the past 6 months. Work, school, play, happy hours, Memorial Day bbq, random road trips, LobsterFest, Yankee games, Home Depot, and Bed Bath and Beyond if you had enough time. All the while my boy was hiking through the mountains from Georgia (the state, not the country….that would really be nuts) to Maine killing bears with his bare hands and running alongside wild ponies in West Virginia. An amazing feat so props to him for having completed one of his long-time ambitions.

A little over six years ago I took a trip to Greece with that same Eric Day. It was the end of our study abroad semester and we had been brainstorming for a while the idea of going to Greece. So needless to say we were pumped for Athens and the islands. Clearly, being the end of a college semester in Europe we were both pretty broke. Over the course of five days literally the only solid food that crossed my lips were gyros. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late night eats. Hands down they were the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. After I left Greece Eric stuck around for another few of days to meet up with some of his friends and claims to have continued his gyro-only diet. Thus began a frivolous and to this day unsettled debate between the two of us over who truly is the pound-for-pound Gyro King?

His claim: that he ate a greater number of gyros than me.

My claim: great, but you were there longer than me. I ate more gyros relative to the time that each of us spent in Greece.

The debate raged on for six years!!

Finally, we met up this past June in the Washington, DC area when he was break from the trail and over lunch we agreed to put our mouths, egos, and stomachs to the test and settle the debate once and for all by squaring off in a 20 year gyro eating contest. The concept is simple. Going by the pure honesty policy, the person who has eaten the most gyros by an agreed upon date 20 years in the future wins. Like I said, the concept is simple, but the rules....well....not so. How to go about conducting our contest raised various philosophical and gastronomical questions - namely, what constitutes a gyro? Does a shawarma count? What about a doner kebab? I did a little research and found the evidence speaks for itself I believe: they’re all shaved meat from a stick, wrapped in a pita, and garnished with onions and veggies but with different names.

As of this writing I am crushing the field. Germany is home to a massive amount of Turkish immigrants and my neighbourhood in Berlin in particular is about 90% Turkish or Middle Eastern. Kebab places galore. I want to say game over but the contest is a marathon, not a sprint. But I also write this because having recently finished the trail Eric is now crying foul about the authenticity of my results. He is debating the gyro-shawarma-doner kebab relationship. So I ask the readers to opine and offer their thoughts on the matter. Attached are some links for your reference. Do not hate the player Eric, hate the gyro-shawarma-doner kebab eater.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyros

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%B6ner_kebab

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawarma

Game Over