At the time, it didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary. I had asked our features editor, Eloise Basuki, to go to Macau and eat everything in sight. A food-eating competition winner—see tacos, female, Australia or chicken wings, Canada—she gladly tackled the assignment, venturing from casino glitz to backstreet bakeries and everywhere in between searching out the perfect meal. No doubt, her culinary report on the casino town, “Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner” (page 74), will leave you salivating for a long weekend on the South China Sea. A month or two earlier, she ventured to Japan’s Iwate prefecture for a story on noodles and inadvertently, so she claims, was roped into slurping 67 bowls of soba in a single, out-of-competition sitting (“City of Noodles,” page 26). Nowhere near the…
