Juliet Lee may not look it, says Steve Hendrix in The Washington Post, but she can eat like a 300-pound truck driver. Though she’s barely 5 feet tall and weighs 100 pounds, Lee is a professional competitive eater, ranked 11th in the world. She has, in various contests, downed 34 hot dogs, 22 pork barbecue sandwiches, 48 tamales, and nearly five dozen miniature hamburgers. She’s also put away 31 dozen raw oysters, 23 dozen cherrystone clams, 13 slices of pizza, 5 pounds of ribs, and 43 inches of a cheesesteak sub. Lee, a mother of two who lives in Germantown, Md., and owns a hair salon, noticed her peculiar talent when she was growing up in China. “I’ve always been able to eat more than anybody else,” she says. “It was embarrassing. I was smaller, but I ate even more than the boys.” She never thought of doing anything about it until three years ago, when she heard about a local pizza-eating contest. “I thought, ‘I can do that.’ That’s me. It’s natural, like a cat knows he can jump from the top of the stairs.” Lee won, scarfing down 11 slices in 10 minutes and beating men more than twice her weight. “They say I hide the food in my bra,” she says. “They just don’t like to lose to a woman.”
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