The Things Chefs Do for Money...

The DC Central Kitchen Food Fight is for a good cause—to battle hunger. And zeal for the cause seems to have affected the celebrity chefs who participated in the early October event at the Reagan Building in Washington.

While Jeffrey Bubin (Bistro Bis) won the formal cooking competition, the race for most memorable stunt went to event co-host Padma Lakshmi (Top Chef), who offered to allow a stranger to eat a slice of ham off her body in exchange for a $1,000 contribution to the cause. (The YouTube video can be found at http://tinyurl.com/9969nsy.)

It was a stunt that the other three co-hosts (Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern, Jose Andrés) probably couldn’t pull off. On the other hand, Bourdain and Zimmern did engage in an impromptu cook-off of their own featuring a bizzare “mystery ingredient”…iguana! Bourdain won, but nobody asked to eat iguana off HIS body…

On the bright side, the event did raise $600,000, so everyone was happy (except perhaps the iguana…).