You Wouldn’t Want to Take This Woman Out to Dinner

Here’s one woman you probably wouldn’t want to take out on a date, at least if you actually planned on eating. Leah Shutkever eats so fast you might barely get a bite in before her plate is empty, leaving you to watch her watch you eat. Nothing makes you feel slow quite like sitting across from someone who finished dinner while you’re still working on the appetizer.

Shutkever is a British speed eater with 42 Guinness World Records titles, and she recently added three more. On August 4, 2026, at Guinness World Records headquarters in London, she ate eight churros in one minute, put away 613 grams of strawberries in the same amount of time and reclaimed the record for fastest time to eat a burrito.

The burrito is the fun one. Shutkever had held the record since 2019 and had most recently set it at 32.35 seconds in 2022. Later that year, Miki Sudo knocked her off the top spot with 31.47 seconds. Shutkever has now taken it back, finishing her burrito in 30.75 seconds. That is not really dinner anymore. That is an athletic event involving tortillas.

Her strange career started with YouTube food challenges. She discovered that Guinness had a record for the fastest time to eat a Chocolate Orange, filmed herself trying to beat it and eventually got invited onto the television show Britain’s Favourite Chocolate for an official attempt. She broke the record and, in her words, chased that feeling from there.

There’s something interesting about speed eating beyond the stopwatch, because we have always attached personality traits to the way people eat. Slow eaters can be seen as patient, civilized and properly interested in savoring their food. Fast eaters can get labeled impatient, greedy or lacking self-control. Jay Rayner once turned that entire argument into a comic rant, essentially suggesting that slow eaters were holding everyone else hostage while fast eaters were simply getting on with dinner.

Of course, eating against a stopwatch isn’t exactly the same thing as sitting down for dinner. There’s a reason most of us aren’t encouraged to eat dinner like we’re racing a clock. Eating slowly gives your body more time to register that you’ve had enough. Shutkever isn’t trying to demonstrate a new approach to Tuesday-night dinner, though. She has turned speed into a very specific skill, complete with rules, records and plenty of practice.

That makes her background even more unexpected. Shutkever has a degree in architecture and describes fitness as a major part of her life. Competitive eating, meanwhile, is her job. She has managed to build a career around something most people would consider an extremely bad idea after Thanksgiving dinner.

Most of us eat because we’re hungry. She eats because somebody put a stopwatch on the table. Just don’t take her out to dinner unless you’re prepared to keep up.

Nibbles: Did you know? Leah Shutkever shares her birthday with National Eat What You Want Day, which is celebrated every May 11.