How I became a nettle eating champion

All of us know what it feels wish to be stung by a nettle, however are you able to think about eating them?

Beth Hodges, 38, from Barry Island ate 19.5m (64ft) of them on the 2024 World Nettle Eating Championships – making her the reigning girls’s champion two years in a row.

More than 30 folks, from as far afield because the US and the Netherlands took half within the competitors on the Dorset Nectar Cider Farm in Waytown, close to Bridport on 22 June.

Ms Hodges mentioned: “The humorous factor is I’ve by no means received something – that is the one factor.”

Participants had half-hour to eat as many leaves as doable earlier than the empty stalks have been counted.

They are given cider to assist wash down the nettles and relieve the ache.

Ms Hodges mentioned her entry into the competitors final yr was not deliberate and had been an impromptu determination – nonetheless, this yr she needed to give again the trophy so thought “why not?”.

Before final yr, she had by no means eaten nettles.

“I bear in mind attempting one simply saying ‘oh my god I’m so out of my depth’,” she mentioned.

Yet the following day she ate 18.3m (60ft) of nettles and received the ladies’s cup.

On 22 June this yr, she took on former world champions and received once more.

“You’re given two foot of nettle stems, a pile of them,” she mentioned. “You can both choose off the leaves individually or strip the stem – then you definitely get the seeds and every little thing.

“I was type of squishing them so I rolled it and squished it into a little bit of a burger patty.

“They get actually dry, they’re fairly fibrous, it will get actually laborious to essentially laborious swallow.

“That’s what slows you down as a result of it is wonderful getting it off the stem, it is the chewing which takes endlessly.

“It tastes a bit like matcha inexperienced tea,” she informed BBC Wales Breakfast on Tuesday.

Ms Hodges mentioned :”They provide you with cider as nicely, so I was dipping it however this yr I had a lot of water.”

Despite eating so many nettles leaves, Ms Hodges mentioned it was not her mouth that harm.

“Your palms are simply on fireplace, which clearly they’d be since you’ve simply grabbed a bunch of stinging nettles – even now I’ve obtained little bits in my fingers.”

She doesn’t have a sport plan, she mentioned – nor does she do something after to ease the ache.

“I simply journey it out,” she mentioned.

So the query of everybody’s lips is, can she do it three years in a row?

She mentioned she’s going to compete and can attempt to outdo her present file.

The custom dates again to the Nineteen Eighties and was held on the Bottle Inn at Marshwood, which has since closed.

The championship started when two farmers had an argument in a pub discussing who had the longest stinging nettles of their area.

The longest-nettle competitors ultimately became the World Nettle Eating Championships when one of many farmers, Alex Williams, promised to eat any nettle which was longer than his.