The Bloke Who Ate a Plane (Seriously)
Category: Eccentric People 25th May 2026
Years ago there was a gentleman who made vegetarianism look positively timid. Michael Lotito, known as "Monsieur Mangetout," spent decades turning the phrase "you are what you eat" into a public service announcement for chaos. This was not performance art for the faint-hearted; he ate metal, glass, rubber, and household appliances as a career.
Lotito's repertoire reads like a scrapyard's dreamlist: bicycles, shopping carts, radiators, televisions and, most famously, a Cessna light aircraft. That aeroplane did not vanish in a single spectacular bite - he reportedly took it apart and consumed it piece by piece over roughly two years. Spectators watched in a mixture of horror and applause while he chewed and swallowed the very things the rest of us politely avoid with forks.
He performed from the 1960s onward in fairgrounds and variety shows, not as a stuntman but as a professional eater whose appetite was astonishingly literal. Accounts from people who saw him say he prepared objects by cutting them into smaller pieces and that he consumed them with mineral oil and water to ease passage. He claimed his stomach tolerated it; doctors later suggested his gastric lining and habits helped him survive. Either way, he lived a normal lifespan and died in 2007, which is inconveniently sensible for such a theatrical life.
What makes Lotito truly eccentric is the absolute, stubborn normality of his routine. He made a living by swallowing what the rest of civilization classifies as waste, then carried on with the paperwork of life: shows, interviews, and the occasional bemused autograph. Imagine being the postman delivering invoices to a man who has recently eaten a television.
There is a cruelty to the modern instinct to medicalise every oddity; Lotito was not a circus curiosity to be sneered at but a human being with an extraordinary talent for eating the unedible. I salute the nerve, the stomach lining and, frankly, the imagination. It takes a particular sort of confidence to chew through a light aircraft and still complain about the queue at the bakery.