IUP students ready to crunch their competition in lettuce-eating contest

Student clubs on college campuses have their defining attributes, and the group that Ava Moriarity and her friends started at Indiana University of Pennsylvania is no exception.

In fact, it even has a distinguishing sound: It’s the crunch of fresh iceberg lettuce being devoured at breakneck speed by undergraduates who seem to have taken their childhood advice, “Eat your vegetables,” to an extreme.

On Thursday evening, The Lettuce Eating Club at IUP will gather for its end-of-semester iceberg lettuce eating contest. Twenty or so students — including one who may test the rules by bringing a blender — hope to earn the title “Head Lettuce” by consuming an entire head (stem not included) faster than anyone else.

What began as a joke last fall between Moriarity and her friends is now a recognized student group at IUP with as many as 60 members, about 20 to 30 of them active. It mirrors student groups found for many years at some secondary schools and, increasingly of late, on college and university campuses.

Is it an odd campus pursuit? Maybe.

But keep in mind they could be binging on beer or pizza or hot dogs. Instead, they will be wolfing down roughage at 6 p.m. inside IUP’s HUB Monongahela Room.

The club is open to “every student at IUP who has a love for leafy vegetables or wants to have a good time!” says the university’s website. The group has periodic meetings that center on healthy nutrition and ways to use lettuce in craft-making.

But the main event is the “Lettuce Off,” as the group calls it.

“It’s a way students can de-stress, let off steam and get their minds off things as final exams approach,” said Moriarity, 19, a sophomore nursing major from Sandy Ridge in Centre County.

The inaugural competition last fall drew a dozen competitors. This prompted a last-minute grocery store run for extra heads of lettuce.

Devising a consumption strategy is key.

“The most common technique is the ‘hamburger method.’ Just kind of trying to squish it like a hamburger and eat it like that,” Moriarity said. “That’s what our winner did last semester. Some people try to tear the leaves. They will try to smash it and see if that works.”

A little salad dressing, perhaps ranch or balsamic vinaigrette, can help, too.

Melvin Young, an IUP criminology major from Philadelphia, won last fall’s inaugural event. He ate an entire head of lettuce in 4 minutes and 5 seconds.

“I didn’t come here to win,” Young later told the school. “I just came here to eat lettuce.”

Across the nation, clubs devoted to consumption and appreciation of lettuce have become more visible in the last decade or so at colleges and universities.

Social media posts refer to campus groups, some of them active and others less so. They include ones at UCLA, the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts and the University of Minnesota. There are social media references to groups at the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University.

The lettuce events are serious, if messy. Each one is a headline writer’s dream.

“New Lettuce Club president stomps and chomps way to victory in fourth annual lettuce eating competition,” trumpeted one October headline in the independent newspaper at Boston’s Northeastern University.

“After a tense match of chewing and swallowing, third-year civil engineering major Evan Eyler emerged victorious, finishing his head of lettuce in three minutes and 52 seconds,” the article stated.

At Minnesota, a 2021 lettuce-eating competition was the first in-person event by the club since the pandemic forced much of campus life online. The Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper, quoted the club’s then-president asking competitors to place their right hand on their lettuce head, their left hand in the air and recite the Lettuce Creed.

“Lettuce compete today with honor, glory, and most importantly a mild appetite for leafy vegetables,” it read in part.

At IUP, Moriarity is a campus tour guide. The idea for a lettuce club came from a conversation with another campus guide who said IUP had an array of clubs, but not one involving lettuce.

“I was joking with my roommate about it, and we’re like, why don’t we start one,” Moriarity said. “I made an Instagram page, and then it has grown so much from there.”

Her roommate, Skylar Stepien, 22, a junior marketing major from Bedford, has even put her role in the lettuce club on her resume.

“It’s a great opportunity to show yourself off as like a person, as opposed to just a commodity trying to fight for a job,” she said.

Moriarity said a large part of the group’s allure is simply how quirky it is.

Campus officials wanted to know: “Is this for real?”

On Thursday, competitors will prove that it is. They will put on their game faces and dig into their lettuce. Besides the sound of chomping, the song “Lettuce” by Dawg Yawp likely will be playing in the background.

As for the blender, a ruling may not come right away.

“We’re all kind of curious to see what’s going to happen with that,” Moriarity said.