Michel Lotito, the French entertainer known as Monsieur Mangetout, could swallow a steel bicycle chain without distress, yet a banana gave him severe heartburn. This episode follows his life from his birth in 1950 in Villard-Bonnot, France, to the teenage years when he began eating strange objects, a habit doctors diagnosed as pica. Gastroenterologists found an unusually thick lining in his stomach and intestines and extremely powerful stomach acids, and he prepared every stunt with care: objects cut into small pieces, swallowed whole like pills, eased down with mineral oil and large volumes of water.

Records estimate he consumed about one kilogram of material a day, roughly nine tons over a career running from 1959 to 1997. His most famous claim, eating a Cessna 150 between 1978 and 1980, draws scrutiny: a 2022 Snopes investigation by Madison Dapcevich confirmed he ate dangerous objects on stage but found no hard proof he consumed the whole plane. He died of natural causes in Grenoble in 2007, aged 57, and inspired a novel by Ben Sherwood and a 2016 children’s picture book.

• Conflicting accounts of whether he started at age 16 or as early as age nine in 1959
• A menu of 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers and a pair of skis
• A waterbed, a coffin with its handles, a computer and a textbook on gravitation
• How he avoided chewing metal and relied on mineral oil and water to protect his throat
• Receiving a Guinness World Records title for strangest diet and eating the brass plaque