This chapter's epigraph is from a famous line by George Eliot: "The gourmet glutton thing" . It's a quote from Eliot's "A Tale of Two Cities" , in which he says that a glutton is a person who eats too much food. Eliot says that the guy who ate the first bowl of ramen is making a huge mistake by eating the second bowl too quickly. He says that he's going to challenge the guy to a duel of the two. Eliot tells us that the challenge will be to eat two balls of ramen in 30 minutes .