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Germantown Mom Is Small Woman, Large Eater
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Juliet Lee's first bite of the day is a doozy. With elegant little fingers, she jams half a beefsteak tomato into a mouth that looks better sized for an olive on a toothpick. Only by leaning over does she spare her satin blouse from a jet of seedy juice.
And this isn't even for money.
"I get hungry in the evening time," said Lee. At least, that's what it sounds like through the garble of tomato pulp. "I could eat 20 tomatoes."
She's not exaggerating. Standing just over 5 feet tall and weighing slightly over 100 pounds, Lee has a quirk for which she is becoming increasingly famous: being a diminutive beauty with the appetite of a linebacker.
Lee, a 44-year-old Germantown mother of two and a busy hair salon owner, is also the 11th-highest-ranked professional competitive eater in the world. This yoga-practicing suburbanite, who wears size zero jeans and shops the junior racks at Kohl's, has eaten, for example, 34 hot dogs, 48 tamales, 22 pork barbecue sandwiches and nearly five dozen miniature hamburgers. All within minutes.
"I've always been able to eat more than anybody else," Lee said in an accent still heavy with the Mandarin of her native northwest China.
On the other side of Lee's Germantown kitchen, her husband, Joey Callow, is chopping vegetables and shaking his head. Her voracious ways are all too familiar to him.
"This is why it's so hard to cook," he calls out as another tomato evaporates. "You cut it, and it just goes away."
The two fix dinner together nearly every night, often with the help of their two teenage daughters. As Callow rinses and chops for tonight's menu of asparagus omelets, salad and shrimp stir-fry, Lee brings in end-of-the-season produce from the backyard garden, a few more tomatoes, the year's last green onion (which Lee rinses, rolls into a ball and pops, whole, into her mouth).
It's a scene domestic and normal, but it also highlights Lee's offbeat metabolism: At 5:30 p.m., this is her first food of the day. Since she was a student at Nanjing University keen to make more time for the library, she has been condensing all her meals into one big one at the end of the day.
Lee thought of her daily binging three years ago when she heard about a local pizza-eating contest. She had never heard of competitive eating, but the concept spoke to her.
"I thought, 'I can do that,' " she said, cutting shiitake mushrooms. "That's me. I love to eat and love to compete. It's natural, like a cat knows he can jump from the top of the stairs."
Her family was supportive but quietly skeptical as Lee bellied up to the big table at Greenbelt Three Brothers Pizza in August 2006. "We were debating her odds, and my daughter said, 'What's between zero and nothing at all?' " Callow recalls. But by the time Lee stopped working her jaws, theirs had dropped. She won, downing 11 slices in 10 minutes, beating men more than twice her weight and setting an amateur record.
"I just had no idea," Callow said. He is now her manager, making the arrangements for about a dozen stops on the pro circuit a year. She's been averaging $5,000 in prize money a year, he said, a little more than enough to cover their travel expenses. "She's not getting rich," he said.
Lee, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1992 after working as a college chemistry teacher, still eats mostly seafood and vegetables. She shops mostly at the Asian market in Germantown.
(Strangely, Lee is not the only tiny Asian woman in this area renowned for eating well above her weight class. Sonya Thomas, who was born in South Korea and lives in Alexandria, is nicknamed "The Black Widow" for her ability to eat more than men five or six times her size.)
On stage, many of the foods Lee faces are new to her. Not that it matters.
Sitting down last Memorial Day at a seafood restaurant in Island Park, N.Y., she had never eaten a cherrystone clam. When she stood up six minutes later, she had eaten 23 dozen of them, a world record.
Soon after her Greenbelt win, Lee was on the Krystal Burger and Nathan's Hot Dogs circuits, eating with the big guys on national television.
Right now, she is getting ready for her next major event, a meatball-eating contest Nov. 8 in Las Vegas. But Lee pointedly said she is not getting ready. She doesn't do test runs or drink stomach-stretching amounts of water or train in any way for an eating outing.
"If I ever start training, they going to be really scared of me," she said.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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