The First Course
Tarrare was born in the French countryside sometime in the 1770s. And right from the jump, something seemed off. The boy could fucking eat. So much so that his parents simply couldn't keep up. Young Tarrare was said to be able to put back a quarter of a cow -- that is to say, his entire body weight -- on the regular. Today you could probably feed him with a 500-pack of hot dogs from Costco, but in the 18th century French countryside, one has to imagine that food still had to, like, come from the ground and shit. So his parents did what any parents would do in this situation: They kicked his skinny ass straight to the curb.
Unbelievable, isn't it? But it's true. Tarrare really was skinny. Reports at the time painted a picture of a slender boy who looked like any other teenager. Oh, except for his mouth. Stretching freakishly beyond the width of a regular person with a regular face, his mouth may have been one of the keys to his success. However, success, as we'll come to see it in Tarrare's world, was defined by filling his insides with mounds of servings from nature's dumpster.
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