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When I heard about a beet-eating contest at Oleksandr Lushchyk’s place in Spenard this summer, I immediately had some questions.
Are the beets cooked? How many beets are eaten? How quickly? And: Why would anyone do this?
I must confess: I did not attend the contest. I heard about it, tragically, after the fact.
But I made some calls. Watched some videos. And quickly decided that Alaska’s only (as far as we know?) beet-eating contest is something the general Anchorage public had to know about.
The competition — held in July at the Midsummer Melodies music festival in Lushchyk’s backyard — is pretty frickin’ iconic. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” blares in the background as contestants chew ferociously, their hands and beards turning a vampiric purple in front of a rowdy crowd of festival-goers. There are no cash prizes, just garlands of turnips and crowns of carrots made by Lushchyk’s mother.
The beets are boiled and skinned. They are whole. Each contestant eats two. This may sound easy. Pleasant, even.
It’s not. The beets are the size of softballs, and participants say they’re very hard to chew.
“It was way harder than I expected,” said Markian Babij, a local naturopathic doctor. “I was like, ‘Gosh, this is a lot to swallow.’ The last thing you want to do is choke in front of these people who are having a nice afternoon.”
Babij, making his first-ever appearance in the yearly contest’s third edition, handily beat (sorry) five other participants. Lushchyk was impressed.
“He’s like, ‘Oh, they’re boiled? Ah, no problem’ — and just crushed it,” Lushchyk said.
As a naturopath, Babij promotes eating vegetables, and the contest appealed to him as a celebration of a particularly tasty and nutritious one. He also said he had an advantage: He grew up on a farm eating a lot of beets.
Babij finished his two beets in five or six minutes, he said. (The organizers don’t keep official statistics.) While he described the experience as “really fun,” Babij also acknowledged some rather unpleasant side effects, including burping and hiccups.
“Oh, gosh,” he added. “Pee was purple. Poop was purple, for a solid couple days.”
Lushchyk got the idea for the contest after hearing a few years ago about an onion-eating competition at a Shrek-themed party at Williwaw Social, the now-closed downtown bar and event space. They had already been organizing Midsummer Melodies — a daylong music and arts festival, where bands play on a stage Lushchyk built in their yard — and beet-eating felt like a good addition.
“Beets hold a very special place in my heart and in my culture because I’m Ukrainian,” Lushchyk said. “We use beets in a lot of our cuisine. I even have a beet and horseradish tattoo on my forearm, because I’ve grown both of those, and you put them together into this condiment called hren, which is delicious on any kind of game meat — or any food really.”
Babij said he wants to defend his title next year, if he gets the chance. Lushchyk said this may have been the last contest for “at least a little while.”
They are not planning to hold Midsummer Melodies next summer because they’ll be busy with a new gig running a popular bluegrass festival in Trapper Creek, 100 miles north of Anchorage.
But, Lushchyk added: “If there’s popular demand, maybe we do the beet-eating contest there.”