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The Breaux Bridge Festival boasts two Crawfish Eating Contests,
a light celebrity contest and a no-holds-barred power eating
contest. Click a thumbnail or the title to view some highlights
of each.
Celebrity
Crawfish Eating Contest
     
Friday's Celebrity Crawfish Eating Contest featured not world-famous
mudbugs, but local celebrities, including the Crawfish Court
(the kings and queens of the festival). The object was to
be the first to finish your tray of crawfish. The trays weren't
the 5-pounders used in the regular contest, but the normal
Styrofoam boxes that any festival-goer can buy. In fact, you
could buy a box and sit on the sidelines and test your own
crawfish-gobbling prowess.
Crawfish
Eating Contest
    
     
     
This is truly the most obscene competition I've ever seen.
Each contestant has 45 minutes to peel and eat the largest
amount of crawfish he or she can keep down. Most of these
folks have it down to a science, peeling 10-20 a minute. And
cheating is practically impossible. If one of the many monitors
spots an uneaten mudbug, it's placed right back on the contestant's
tray.
Anyone who cares to pay the $20 entrance fee can participate.
This year, the contestants all got festival t-shirts (a $20
value), plus all the crawfish and drink of choice they could
consume in 45 minutes, so we figured we might just try next
year for the pure bargain of it! Of course, we'll get creamed.
Although the winners (1st,
2nd, and 3rd
place) were all from Louisiana, the early leader was contestant
#1 from Lufkin, Texas. He was a good 5 pounds ahead of
everyone after only 30 minutes. But somewhere around 35 minutes
and 19 1/2 pounds, he decided to call it quits. The emcee
warned the other contestants he could still win the contest
if no one topped his haul. A moment later, the announcer came
back with the news that #1 from Lufkin was a scratch.
Why was he scratched? Rule #1: The winner gets the most down.
Rule #2: What goes down, stays down...and it didn't.
So, with Lufkin out of the picture, the 1st place honors went
to a Breaux Bridge native who consumed 18 1/2 pounds.
Before you freak out, remember that a pound of crawfish only
yields about 1/4 pound of peeled crawfish tails, so while
18 1/2 pound of crawfish is still a heck of a lot of meat,
the contestants aren't quite as gluttonous as the numbers
might imply.
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