Number of words: 114

As the twentieth century progressed and food became cheaper, the regal sport of binge-eating became steadily democratised, to the point where it wrote off the white trash king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley. The 25-stone Elvis ate himself to death by midnight-snacking on a pair of 42,000-calorie baguettes containing a jar of strawberry jam, a jar of peanut butter and a pound of crisp-fried bacon. The baguettes were followed by up to five hamburgers and five fried peanut butter and mashed banana sandwiches – at which point Presley suffered, in a coroner’s words, ‘a terminal event on the commode’.

Excerpted from pages 54 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish