I enjoy a good feed as much as the next bloke.

When the nuns in school taught us that our bodies were temples, I thought it was because I looked like the Taj Mahal.

But no matter how much food I manage to put away, I will always be an amateur compared to people in the world of competitive eating.

And I have stumbled across a champion who, I believe, deserves public adulation.

I refer to Takeru Kobayashi – sex symbol and eater extraordinaire.

A bloke who devours food at a competitive level.

A man who treats a three-course meal as a snack between six-course meals.

Seriously, there is a competition called Major League Eating – a sporting arena for gargantuans of gastronomy.

While the world was focused on that minor sporting event in Beijing, poor old Kobayashi and his fellow eating machines went virtually unnoticed.

As members of the competitive eating world’s upper echelon, they were in Singapore for an eat-off in front of about 300 fans, most of whom were presumably wearing raincoats to protect their clothing from gravy splatters.

Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, from California, got the lunch wagon rolling by polishing off four kilograms of chicken satay in 12 minutes, but my man Kobayashi wasn’t fazed and barely raised a sweat as he inhaled five kilograms to take first place.

Now when I first read about this I had a mental picture of Kobayashi looking like one of those sumo wrestlers.

Then I read he’s just 173 centimetres tall and weighs 73 kilograms wringing wet.

Fair dinkum, the bloke must be a freak.

It seems he’s something of a legend in the competitive eating world and won a major hot-dog eating contest in New York for six years running before Chestnut beat him last year.

Sporting fans will be disappointed to hear that I don’t have any stats on how many dogs he eats, but I do know that Chestnut once ate 66 hot-dogs and buns in just 12 minutes.

“During a contest, I get in a zone where it’s just me and the food,” Kobayashi said.

I’m hoping his mum taught him to swallow what was in his mouth before he started talking, or it would have been a very messy interview.

“Sometimes it’s like I’m in a trance.”

Yep, me too big fella. Stand me in the line for a smorgasbord and I’m in another world.

But I am a rank amateur compared to Kobayashi, who earnt about $200,000 in prizemoney and appearance fees last year.

And there are other benefits, apparently.

“It’s very embarrassing. I don’t think I’m a sex symbol,” Kobayashi said. “But sometimes women send me their clothing.”

Yeah, I’ll bet really big women send him really big pairs of granny knickers!

But 24-year-old Chestnut had excuses for his poor performance in Singapore.

“The sauce was sweeter than I expected and that slowed me,” he said.

“I couldn’t find my rhythm. And Kobayashi is a machine.”

Presumably he means one of those monster trucks.

Fair dinkum, these blokes should have been at the Olympic Games instead of those synchronised swimmers or dressage people.

But with all this talk about Viagra being used as a performance-enhancing drug at the Games it could be a recipe for disaster.

Seriously, they reckon the way Viagra improves blood flow through the whole body – not just the parts being specifically targetted by users - helps athletes perform better.

They’re even talking about putting it on the list of banned substances in time for the 2012 Olympics.

A good thing too.

Imagine if eating became an Olympic sport and people like Kobayashi and Chestnut popped a couple of the little blue pills just before chowing down.

I’d pay good money to see that event.

But I’d make sure I wore a raincoat.