The County Durham pub selling this stack of flesh thinks it might actually kill someone. But that hasn’t put off some enthusiastic eaters

The 12,000-calorie burger: why one pub is offering a meat feast – and cash towards your gravestone

Name: The Big Ben Number 10.

Price: £28.95.

Appearance: 12,000 calories of possible death.

Jesus Christ, what is that thing? Oh, you mean that towering stack of charred meat, cheese, bacon and grease? That’s the Big Ben Number 10. Fancy a bite?

No! Oh, come on, try some. I know it looks like a still from a documentary about a zoo that burned down, but what have you got to lose?

I don’t know, my basic artery function? Listen, sure the Big Ben Number 10 is a big burger. Sure it’s just 10 burgers piled up on top of each other between mounds of cheese and 25 rashers of bacon. Sure, it weighs 1.5kg. Sure, you might actually die trying to eat it. But it’s OK because they have thought of that.

Who’s thought of what? The George Pub and Grill in County Durham has thought of this burger actually killing someone. It comes with advice that customers eat it at their own risk, plus the owner has promised to pay £500 towards the headstone of anyone who drops dead during the challenge.

Seems like a nice guy. He’s got a big heart. And so will you once you’ve clogged your entire circulatory system with damp wads of half-chewed meat.

Has anyone actually attempted this? Apparently so. Competitive eater Kyle Gibson recently took on the Big Ben Number 10, and polished the whole thing off in just under 22 minutes. He claimed it was the best burger he’d ever tasted, which very possibly means he enjoys gorging to the point of nausea on food that went cold 15 minutes previously.

Do you get anything if you finish it? The owner of the George says you get “bragging rights”. Because your friends love nothing more than when you waddle up to them and boast about how you’ve become the unofficial poster boy for the sort of uncontrolled consumption that will almost certainly result in the end of humanity itself.

And how many calories did you say it had? 12,000.

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Can you put that into perspective? Well, the NHS states that a healthy adult male should aim to eat about 2,500 calories a day. So this burger isthe equivalent of eating everything you should normally eat in a working week.

I still don’t get it. Can you put it in Guardian terms for me? Oh, fine, it’s like eating 10kg of quinoa.

Oh my god! That’s obscene. Great, now you finally get it.

Do say: “The best thing you can do to combat the climate emergency is give up meat.”

Don’t say: “The second best is reducing the population by one, by dying through a genuinely pointless food challenge.”