The world is full of people who have achieved greatness: Albert Einstein, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and these two men in Hong Kong who managed to eat 176 cookies in less than 30 minutes.
Last night, thousands of people tuned in to watch a livestream of the duo eat an entire tin of Garden Bakery cookies. As of this morning, the video of the endeavor has been viewed more than 214,000 times.
The challenge, which begins at the 8:28 mark, was streamed by 100Most, a satirical media platform that made headlines for its seriously stellar debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange last year.
The challengers were the bespectacled Wong Ka-wai, better known as his TV presenter persona Tung Fong Shing, and a guy called Mark, who takes part in eating competitions, and who told Wong that one of his most impressive eating accomplishments was scarfing down 42 chicken wings in 10 minutes.
The cookie challenge was born of the Chinese New Year tradition of giving family members gifts of food — typically tasty treats like a box of chocolates or cookies. In Hong Kong, one of the most popular gifts is a box of Garden Bakery cookies, which come in an iconic red tin — about 30 centimeters deep, 20 centimeters long, and 20 centimeters wide — containing an assortment of cookies that, the joke goes, never get finished because of the sheer size of the tin.
Netizens on message board HKGolden have even joked that Jesus actually fed 5,000 people with two fishes and five tins of Garden Bakery cookies.
Each tin contains 176 biscuits, and weighs about 1,340 grams.
The duo challenged themselves to finish the whole tin in 30 minutes, which means that in order to complete the Herculean feat, the duo would have to wolf down about six cookies per minute between them.
As the challenge was under way, netizens cheered on the duo to “eat faster,” while others advised “the more you talk, the slower you eat, so stop talking!”
“Just watching this makes me feel full,” said another, while others sent in vomiting emojis.
The duo eventually managed to complete the challenge in just under 26 minutes.
Mark and Wong did better than this guy who in August was challenged, and failed, to eat 90 chicken McNuggets in 90 minutes.
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