BOISE, IDAHO — Guinness World Records has had a busy few weeks on the food front, certifying a run of oversized snacks and record-breaking spreads from Idaho to Pennsylvania.
The biggest headline out of the Gem State: the Idaho Potato Commission and the eatery chain Spud Daddy produced 1,474 pounds of fresh-cut fries at Boise's Potato Days festival in early October, edging out the previous largest-serving-of-fries record of roughly 1,453 pounds set in Gujarat, India, in 2018. A team of about 50 volunteers turned 1,700 pounds of raw potatoes into the record-setting pile using six fryers.
A season of snack records
The fries followed closely on the heels of Conagra Brands' record for the world's longest meat snack stick, a 429-foot, 5-inch Slim Jim unveiled at the company's Omaha campus in September that beat a 314-foot stick made by Wisconsin's Wenzel's Farm the year before. Conagra said its production team kept the recipe identical to a standard-sized Slim Jim despite the scale-up.
Philadelphia International Airport got in on the trend earlier this year, lining up 1,291 cheesesteaks between two terminals for National Cheesesteak Day, according to UPI's roundup of the season's food titles, while serial record-breaker David Rush added a title of his own: moving 51 malt balls between two bowls with a straw in one minute.
None of the records appear to have been contested, and Guinness adjudicators were on hand to certify each one in person, a now-standard practice the organization uses to guard against disputes over measurements that, in this stretch, ranged from a fry pile weighed by the ton to a meat stick measured by the yard.
Not every entry required heavy machinery. In Seattle, organizers of a Chinatown-International District block party counted 830 qualifying diners at a communal dim sum dinner this summer, short of the roughly 900 people who showed up because some stood before the official headcount was taken. And in Britain, recent game-show winner Nathan Davies added his name to the list by eating 15 fish fingers in a minute, a title he said he set his sights on almost as soon as his other, far larger windfall came through.