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December first is National Pie Day, a mere five days after National Cake Day and just three days after National Gain Five Pounds Day. For those who miss this one, there is a second competing National Pie Day on January 23, but you don’t have to choose one over the other. To the American Pie Council (“championing pie excellence since 1995”), this doesn’t pose a problem. Each day, in fact, can be pie day. When pie’s your name, pie’s your game.

 

But to complicate things with mathematics, there is also Pi Day falling on March 14 every year. Here is one idea to help celebrate.

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Our love of pies is a legacy of our colonial past. The British love pies more than we do perhaps and will put almost anything into one. The British have not just one or two pie days, but an entire week. British Pie week is the first week in March, just prior to Pi Day coincidentally.

 

According to the American Pie Council, one in five Americans claims to have eaten a whole pie before. How many calories is that? Depending on the size, the range is 2200 to 3200 calories for an apple pie and up to 5200 for a whole pecan pie.

 

Pie eating contests are a thing in the countries where pies are loved—the US and the UK. In case you thought Joey Chestnut, "the greatest eater of all time" was strictly a hot dog guy, turns out he’s branched out to other food groups, including pies—particularly meat pies, apple pies, boysenberry pies, and cherry pies. The world record for apple pie ingesting belongs to none other than that human eating machine, the man with a python for a GI tract, who ate thirteen pounds of apple pie in 8 minutes in 2013. Then in 2017 he ate 17.5 pounds of cherry pie in 8 minutes. Which, incredibly, calculates into exactly 3.1415926 pies, give or take.

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The world pie eating championship occurs annually in Wigan, Great Britain and favors speed over volume. The prize is for the fastest eating of a single meat pie. That record, 23 seconds, belongs to Martin Appleton-Clare. In contrast, champion key lime pie eating contestants take around forty seconds to scarf a single pie, wishing, perhaps, to slow down and savor the moment.

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