What Car Would Monsieur Mangetout Eat in 2022?

I wonder if that clutch is organic?Photo: Ben Curtis – PA Images (Getty Images)

For most of us, the idea of eating metal or glass is completely outrageous, the kind of thing they’d use as a means of torture in a Saw film. For Monsieur Mangetout, aka Mr. Eat-It-All, aka Michel Lotito, it was a hobby, an obsession, and, eventually, a job.

Some background: Michel Lotito was born in Grenoble, France, in 1950 and died in Grenoble, France, in 2007. In between, he earned numerous Guinness World Records for eating dozens of inedible things, including several vehicles in their entirety.

He got his start eating the inedible at the age of 16. As Lotito tells it, “I accidentally broke a glass while drinking, and I had a piece in my mouth. I knew other people had eaten glass in the past and decided that I could do it as well. Then I moved on to razor blades, plates and small pieces of metal such as nuts and bolts.”

The Man That Only Ate METAL – Guinness World Records

Messed up, right? We’re just getting started. Later he’d go on to allegedly eat all kinds of things, including an entire Cessna airplane. The process would take several years, but if you’re going to have a claim to fame, there are worse ones. I mean, Idi Amin was pretty famous, right? Exactly.

How did Lotito manage to eat all this metal, glass, rubber and the like? One bite at a time, of course! But really, he attributed his success to consuming vast quantities of water and mineral oil during his metallic snack breaks. It stands to reason that sharing a bathroom with this man would have been an ordeal.

Of course, all of Monsieur Mangetout’s claims could be horsepucky, but even Snopes couldn’t totally disprove them, so there’s a chance that he actually did eat all of the things he claimed to have gnawed on.

Now, with the history lesson over, we come to the truly important stuff, and that’s trying to decide what Michel Lotito’s perfect automotive meal would look like in this year of our lord 2022 as it draws to a close.

Would he start with a light appetizer like an Alpine A110? Or perhaps something of the two-wheeled variety, like a Ducati Monster? Would the main course be something robust and full-blooded like a Bentley Flying Spur, or something spicier yet satisfying like a Ferrari Purosangue? How about dessert? Obviously, there’s nothing sweeter than an ND-generation Mazda Miata, and maybe he’d finish with a little caffeinated pick-me-up like a Genesis GV60.

Let us know what you think his menu would be in the comments. This is important stuff.