I didn’t watch a whole lot of television over my Thanksgiving break, mostly because I was too busy ladling melted butter into my mouth, but most of the television I did watch was appropriately food-based. I don’t get the Travel Channel at home, and so I took the opportunity of two hundred channels (glorious, glorious variety) to sample the delights of one of the most painful food programs I have ever encountered – Man Vs. Food.

When I say painful, I don’t mean painful like One Tree Hill or America’s Got Talent, because it’s actually a reasonably well-made, entertaining show. The host, or “Man,” is Adam Richman, an actor who doesn’t seem to know all that much about food but makes up for this lacuna with bountiful enthusiasm. He’s funny and friendly, enjoys joking with the people he meets at restaurants across the country, and for the most part, refrains from the ultra-cheesy puns that plague a great deal of one-man food programming. (I’m mostly looking at you, Alton Brown.)

This single serving of food includes a whole chicken, a beef rib, brisket, a turkey leg, six sausages, and a pulled pork sandwich

The painful part comes at the end of each episode – after touring the culinary highlights of a chosen city, Adam participates in whatever local food challenge he can find. This tends to take the form of eating an immense amount of food in a short period of time, although occasionally the challenge deals with spiciness, as with Little Rock, Arkansas, where Adam attempts to eat a pulled-pork sandwich heavily doused in a habanera sauce called “Shut Up Juice.” Prizes generally include either a picture on the establishment’s wall, or a challenge-themed tshirt. At first it’s funny. The proprietor brings out a hamburger the size of a Volvo, or hands Adam some rubber gloves to prevent spice burns while he’s eating the Shut Up Juice, and the assembled patrons cheer while he takes the first bite. After that, it’s really about walking the fine line between entertainment and nausea. Maybe I’m particularly sensitive, but watching a guy trying to shovel twenty pounds of beef into his mouth in less than an hour seems not too far from watching someone be tortured. I flash back to that amazing scene from Roald Dahl’s Matilda, when Miss Trunchbull forces Bruce Bogtrotter to eat an entire chocolate cake in front of the whole school. That scene was not supposed to be enjoyable for the assembled audience.

Astonishingly, Adam manages to finish this Shut Up Juice Sandwich, although the final task of keeping it down for five minutes proves difficult

And yet, Adam takes on each new challenge with such excitement and pleasure, you have to wonder if he suffers from some sort of food-induced memory loss. Obviously incapacitated while eating, he narrates each challenge with epic voiceovers (“Nothing helps. Each bite washes over me like a wave of white hot heat…speed is my only ally”) and commentary from the restaurant patrons (“These are intense moments, he’s over there pounding the table, sweat’s rolling down his face”), and I think it’s in the voiceovers where you can see the appeal. It’s just food, after all, but Man Vs. Food makes eating a kind of gladiatorial showdown, universal, momentous, and laudable. The title, which is just like the universal themes of literature we all learned about in middle school English classes (man vs. society, man vs. nature, man vs. man), really captures the show’s tone. It can’t be doing good things to our national obesity epidemic, but it’s so silly and good-natured, you almost forget the pain.