The result was one of the simplest, most satisfying sweet-tooth appeasers I’ve found, as well as one of the easiest ways to impress a backyard full of partygoers. While some stone fruit purists might be wary (“If you already have sweet, ripe peaches, why mess with perfection?”), most will be convinced after one bite. In-season peaches are glorious on their own, but these taste like something else entirely: the sugar-plus-heat combination makes for a seductive caramelizing effect, balsamic vinegar cuts through the sweetness; factor in a touch of smoke flavor from the coals and you essentially have s’mores for grown-ups, with a texture almost exactly like peach pie filling. Best of all, you can cook them without having to leave the backyard for more than two minutes. My recipe is as follows:

Grilled peaches with brown sugar balsamic glaze

Serves 4

Salon met with MLE chairman George Shea and top official and head judge Mike Antolini to discuss their Olympic dreams, controversial eating styles, obesity and the upsetting dearth of organic flaxseed-based competitions.

Mike, you run operations and marketing for MLE, but at the Nathan’s contest, you also act as the head judge. How does judging work for an event of this size, when so many things are happening at once?

Mike Antolini: With a contest like this — I mean, it’s the mecca of our competitive eating schedule, the world championship, the Super Bowl, if you will, of our sport. There’s so much going on. There are five hot dogs and buns on each plate, and things are going so fast that it’s really very tough to follow. You just have to stay focused and try to take it all in. We basically have a pit of judges, officials in jerseys in front of the table, and then each eater has two judges assigned to them. I’ll be in the middle of the table, focusing on the main competitors, basically as an added layer, to make sure there’s no foul play.

George Shea: We double up on judges for the Fourth of July. And on some of the lesser judge places, we’ve auctioned off judgeships for charity. I mean, they won’t be judging Joey Chestnut, because they don’t have any experience. But they also probably wouldn’t want to be judging Joey Chestnut.

There have actually been quite a few judging controversies over the last few years, right?

M.A.: There’s hundreds of thousands of dollars of prize money, and there’s also a lot of pride that the athletes compete for, so it really does become very competitive. And among the circuit, there’s always talk. Do some eaters bend the rules? Do they eat messy on purpose, or inadvertently? Does somebody deserve a deduction? Did anybody have a Reversal of Fortune [the official MLE term for puking], which is an automatic disqualification? Now, Joey Chestnut happens to be a very clean eater. There are folks who feel former six-time champ Kobayashi is a very messy eater, and when people are messy eaters, they think: Are they putting dogs or buns under the table, or in the cups that the eaters dunk them in?

G.S.: They just ate 60 hot dogs in 10 minutes. You should see the table. You have to go through and count the plates to confirm, and a lot of times with the dunking, there will be a little bun leftover. You don’t DQ a guy for that, you deduct a little bit … but if there’s [mimes gagging motion], you have to decide — is that a disqualification? There was outrage in the competitive eating community in 2007 because the call on ESPN was that Kobayashi was going to be disqualified, and he wasn’t. We stood by the judges, as we always do. Which is tough if you’re Joey Chestnut. I mean, there’s money involved, but it’s really about the prestige.

This is the biggest event for you guys, but MLE puts on contests year-round, and you’ve been steadily adding them each year — oysters, chowder, ribs. What’s the process like for starting a new eating competition? Are any foods off-limits?

G.S.: We do not eat “Fear Factor” kinds of food and we wouldn’t eat anything unsafe, but other than that it is open. Most of our foods are selected by sponsors, either because they are connected as a brand or because we and they feel the food will connect with an audience. Generally, we receive inquiries from brands seeking to generate publicity, and we develop the contests with them.

Are there any foods that competitors really dread?

G.S.: Many eaters will not do La Coste&ntildea jalapeño contest because of the obvious difficulty. But Sonya ["The Black Widow" Thomas] and Pat ["Deep Dish" Bertoletti] ate 275 last month.

How do you respond to critics who say competitive eating sends the wrong message — that it’s an insensitive display of gluttony at a time when we’re trying to fight rising obesity levels?

G.S.: We get fewer complaints than you might expect. With regard to obesity in the United States, no one would argue that we’re the cause of it. I could see if we were out there thumbing our nose, like, “Let’s eat everything in sight,” like some college thing, but it’s a sport. And we treat it like a sport. It’s a sport that involves the consumption of food, but it’s not an exercise in waste. If you want to get to the bottom of obesity, you have to look at people’s activity levels and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

And with regard to world poverty and hunger?

G.S.: Hunger does come up: “How could you do this if people are starving?” For one, any of the food products that we consume — say, chicken wings — those chicken wings are not otherwise going to food charities or anything. It’s like having a pool and saying, “Well, there’s a drought in Africa; you can’t have a pool.” My water’s not going to get there.

Also, the truth is that every all-you-can-eat buffet and supermarket in America throws away more food every week than we eat all year. That’s not an exaggeration. No one talks about the amount of food that’s thrown away from the grocery stores. But we do understand that if we are eating food in a lighthearted way, clearly we have an obligation to address hunger issues, so we donate quite a bit. The numbers aren’t huge — I think that over the last year or two we raised $50,000, but that’s a significant amount of money for us. We’ve done a couple events for food banks, and this year Nathan’s is giving 100,000 hot dogs to the food bank.

Have you had any pressure from local or organic food activists to change the foods you use or try to make a political statement through these competitions? There’s no artisanal division as of yet, right?

G.S.: I would like to see a flaxseed eating contest, or an organic omega-3 antioxidant eating contest, but very few epicureans inquire about events.

Your logo has a hand with a fork in it, but we don’t usually see utensils at eating competitions. Are they too dangerous, or do they just slow people down?

G.S.: There are indeed some utensil-based contests [baked beans requires a spoon], but most frequently the eaters use the fork that God gave them.

There’s been talk of the Olympics before. Do you think that’s where competitive eating is headed?

G.S.: I don’t think the Olympics is a viable option at this juncture, because Jacques Rogge, the head of the IOC, has repeatedly failed to respond to our requests to be part of the Olympics. It’s a shame, because we’d be perfect. In the winter, we could do something warm, like a s’more. And in the summer Olympics, we’d do something cold like, I don’t know, a chilled dill soup. But no response whatsoever.

And you know what, we don’t need the Olympics now. Maybe 20 years ago, it would have benefited us. But the growth of our sport in the U.S. has gone from 25 events around 10 years ago to 80-plus now. We’re on TV. I think overseas expansion is really where it’s at for us. In the past year or so, we’ve been in Australia, Singapore, Canada, Greece, England, the Czech Republic. I see us as an event-driven, free-media-driven platform across the U.S. and overseas, with some TV.

How has competitive eating been received in other countries? It seems like such a fundamentally American thing to do.

G.S.: When we first started expanding, we really didn’t know whether the sentiment and the vibe and presentation would play well overseas, but it really has. It is very popular in Japan, and its growth there was independent of our efforts here. We had an event in Canada, and it was the biggest story in the Canadian media that day. It was the lead item trending on Canadian Twitter. They got, you know, maybe $100 million worth of media coverage.

That’s a lot of media coverage. What were they eating?

M.A.: Poutine. It’s a Canadian comfort food kind of thing: French fries, chicken gravy and cheese curds. So it really resonated. That event was huge.

And how do you account for the growth in general? What is it about competitive eating that appeals to spectators and athletes?

G.S.: I think it’s popular because it is dramatic, amazing and funny … and it has a direct connection to the audience members. Not everyone golfs or plays basketball — and no one with any sense curls — but everyone eats. You and I can eat three eggs, maybe, but Sonya Thomas can eat 65 in six minutes and 47 seconds.

Finally, there’s some big news for this year’s hot dog contest. It was announced Tuesday that Kobayashi won’t be at this year’s contest because of a contractual dispute with MLE. What’s the deal?

G.S.: We have tried very hard to come to an agreement with Kobayashi’s camp, but we’re at an impasse. We remain open to resolving this issue, but we’re not optimistic that it’ll happen — it just doesn’t seem like he wants to be there. Kobayashi ushered in the modern era of competitive eating, but he has since had trouble keeping up the level of competition that he created. He lost three years in a row to Joey, and he lost one month ago on his own home turf. We wish he were going to be there, but it’s important to remember that the competition for Joey has really not been diminished.

Now that Kobayashi is out, who should we be watching? Any up-and-comers?

G.S.: As I said, the competition for Joey has really not been diminished. There are still three serious contenders. The No. 2 eater right now is Bob Shoudt [who has beaten Chestnut in rib, grits and spaghetti competitions]. Then there’s Patrick Bertoletti and Tim Janus ["Eater X"]. Those three will all be in the 50s.

M.A.: Ben Monson is a rookie a lot of people are looking at this year. He’s from California, a 22-year-old personal trainer, and he beat Joey Chestnut in a flauta-eating contest in his third event ever. He’s really beaten the who’s who in less than a year of eating.

G.S.: If Joey hits 70, as he expects he will, he’ll beat these guys. But they’ll be at the level Kobayashi was. When Joey heard Kobayashi wasn’t coming, his response was “That doesn’t change anything for me.” It’s not like he’s got a holiday.

As the child of two ex-hippie, union-proud parents, I also appreciated American Apparel’s political stances, which they hawked almost as enthusiastically as their hoodies. The “sweatshop-free” label is hard not to support, and I nodded approvingly when I noticed T-shirts broadcasting progressive views on immigration policy and gay rights. But for the past few years, every time I’ve forked over my hard-earned money for, say, a $30 skirt made from a single yard of material, I experienced a gnawing feeling of regret — and it’s not just because I’m broke. You see, up until recently, I had been avoiding a deeper truth about the company: From its advertisements to its hiring policies to its CEO, everything about American Apparel is sexist, seedy and seriously offensive. So, as of this week, I’m quitting cold turkey — and I’m not the only one. As the company grapples with credit problems, messy management and bad P.R., American Apparel appears, for the first time, in danger of going out of fashion.

Currently the largest clothing manufacturer in the United States, American Apparel opened its first retail store on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard in 2003, after a few years as a wholesale T-shirt supplier for uniform companies and screen printers. Less than two years later, there were 53 stores in five countries; CBS called it “the fastest retail roll out in American history.” It’s not hard to see why the company was so successful: Its marketing campaign, positioning American Apparel as the clothing store of do-gooders, was both timed and targeted perfectly. A generation (mine) had just hit their early 20s and was growing more concerned (some would say self-important) about how and where they made purchases, about their roles and responsibilities as conscious consumers. We were teenagers when both name-brand obsession and awareness about the overseas sweatshops at work behind $300 Nikes reached their apex. American Apparel’s clean, simple aesthetic appealed to those of us who never wanted oversize Adidas anoraks or Old Navy bikinis in the first place. We were middle-school misfits, the kind of kids whose identity was forged by a childhood craving to belong, followed by an adolescent rejection of that conformity. (I have no idea where today’s equivalent 13-year-old shops. Hot Topic, maybe? I’m clearly out of touch.)

And so, in its early boom years, American Apparel-wearers formed a kind of outsidery in-club. Like the after-after party that only the coolest kids knew about, their clothes were a subtle indication that you were different from the girls in the Gap T-shirts — and by different, you meant hipper. You were broadcasting that you likely had overlapping interests with other American Apparel-wearers: Hey, you like David Bowie too? Do you ride a bike? Should we go on a bike ride and talk about veganism and then go buy some vinyl?

Of course, all clothes are a way of branding oneself. But much of American Apparel’s success can be attributed to the canny marketing of its product as an earnest alternative to that brand identification, the genius of unbranding. Even for customers who saw through that bullshit (and I would argue there weren’t many, in the beginning, who even thought about it), there were other reasons to recommend shopping there. For one, the well-known fact that all the clothing was made in a factory in downtown Los Angeles surely meant that we were supporting fair labor practices. Right?

Only, um, not — unless you call being regularly verbally abused and sexually humiliated by your boss “fair.” The past five years have been a public unraveling for founder, CEO and noted creep Dov Charney, starting with a highly publicized 2004 article in (now defunct) Jane magazine in which he repeatedly masturbated and received oral sex from a female employee in front of reporter Claudine Ko. Charney closed out the decade having been sued by his employees for sexual harassment on at least five separate occasions, for charges ranging from exposing himself to telling area managers to hire young women with whom he could have sex, ideally Asians.

All of which would be disturbing enough. But then there is the most recent controversy, in which disgruntled former employees leaked internal documents about nauseating hiring practices and employee “grooming” standards to Gawker — including comments about which “type” of black girl is appropriate to have working at the store — all of which paints a sordid picture of a company whose entire corporate culture is dominated by misogynistic, overgrown-indie-frat boy attitudes about women and sexuality, from policing haircuts to doling out raises based purely on sex appeal. (Additional revelations include the ominous detail that company whistleblowers are hit with a gobsmacking $1 million penalty.) No one who’s ever seen a typical American Apparel billboard — filled, as they usually are, with images of disembodied female torsos and asses — should be surprised by this breaking news. If Tommy Hilfiger wants to define “sexy” as preppy white college kids lounging around on a yacht in the Hamptons, American Apparel wants “sexy” to be emaciated, ethnically ambiguous, suspiciously pre-pubescent girls who look like they were shipped here to be sex slaves, and just crawled out of their crates into headbands and fishnet leotards. Which is to say: Does anyone wearing American Apparel really think they’re sporting the badge of the awesome progressive shoppers club anymore? That they’re being “alt”-anything? Do the strides the company has made toward fair labor standards outweigh the other kinds of exploitation it regularly practices?

Charney’s alleged abuse notwithstanding, the company isn’t really doing anything illegal. By federal law, hiring practices that discriminate based on race, gender, height, age and disability are prosecutable; picking employees based on how attractive they are — or, as Charney likes to put it in his standard self-defense statements, how good their “style” is — is perfectly fine. That’s not likely to change any time soon. (And it’s surely not limited to American Apparel.) The billboard-size crotch shots that currently punctuate my morning commute each day in New York aren’t likely to change either.

One thing that can change? The company’s reputation as socially progressive — and its reign as clothing retailer-of-choice among people who pride themselves on supporting responsible businesses. For me, the sketch factor has finally begun to outweigh the positives. Sorry, Charney. A few nice political stances don’t cancel out a corporate culture built on misogyny.

There are signs the sleaze-tastic empire is losing its edge: With 285 stores in 20 countries, American Apparel reported major losses for the first time ever in the first quarter of this year. Last year, concerns over potentially illegal workers resulted in a punishing 1,500 layoffs. And the store is currently renegotiating a loan with a British equity firm that got it out of hot water with creditors in 2009. Imported competitors like H&M and Uniqlo are homing in on the company’s target market, and some analysts say there’s a real chance that American Apparel could go under — but things will probably get a lot wackier first. On Wednesday, in conjunction with BUTT Magazine, it unveiled a new X-rated beach towel collection, a summer accessory Martha Stewart probably won’t be recommending any time soon. (They go great with gold lamé!)

As for me, I won’t be sporting one on the beach this year. My protest is simple: to stop shopping there. So whatever happens to the company, I’ll be watching from the sidelines. Or, rather, from outside those impeccable storefront windows, as I stroll by without going in. And I expect to feel a little cleaner for it.

Emma Silvers is an editorial fellow at Salon.

But things have gotten a little rocky for the 6-year-old company in recent weeks, when changes in its privacy settings caused outrage among users, talk of a “Facebook exodus,” and, finally, backpedaling by the company’s 26-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The incident raised prickly questions about how the social network is changing the modern view of privacy — one of the many that David Kirkpatrick, the former senior editor for Internet and technology for Fortune magazine, explores in his new book, “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World.” With unprecedented access to Facebook’s creators and headquarters, Kirkpatrick tells the story of the company’s rise from collegiate project to cultural phenomenon.

Salon spoke to Kirkpatrick about the company’s privacy scandals, the keys to its success, and the reasons most of us probably won’t be leaving Facebook any time soon.

Why is the story of Facebook important?

Facebook grew so big so fast, and people got used to using it so quickly, that a lot of them haven’t stepped back and given much thought to how it’s different from what came before, and that’s something I hope my book will do — give perspective. It’s extremely powerful technology and, frankly, we should all understand how it works.

Facebook is known for having a tightly run P.R. machine, and in this book you seem to have bypassed it completely.

I think Mark Zuckerberg knew I was somebody who was convinced it was an important phenomenon, and he knew it needed to be explained a lot better than he was capable of explaining it. Also, Facebook was founded on his own belief in a growing transparency that he thought was going to envelop all of modern life, and he really does believe in transparency, so he didn’t think there was anything wrong with the full story of Facebook coming out. They had no right of approval on this. I like to say it was authorized, but not approved. They gave me access, but they asked for nothing in return, and I think there are very few companies that would give me that kind of access and not ask to see anything before it comes out.

In the earlier sections of the book, you go into the evolution of online social networking — the history of websites like Friendster and MySpace. Why does Facebook seem to just keep growing while other sites have either had really modest success, by comparison, or failed completely?

I think it was a confluence of things. Starting it at Harvard was a big factor: Because [Zuckerberg] was at a university, he was able to create a system based on genuine identity, that was authenticated with the university-issued e-mail address that each student had. They could make an ironclad identification between the e-mail holder and the name in the profile, and that created a culture from Day One that was based on using your real name and being who you really were on the server. That was something none of the predecessors had been successful at — Friendster tried to have real names but it was thwarted, MySpace didn’t even really try. The concept of real identity became central to how Facebook worked — knowing that your friends are the people they say they are.

Another important factor was digital photography, which was taking off just around the time Facebook launched. More people were starting to have cellphones they took pictures with, and Facebook really took advantage of that with the photo application. At the same time, broadband Internet had just started to penetrate more American households. I also think Mark Zuckerberg is a pretty uniquely visionary leader, and he made a lot of really good calls over the years as the service encountered problems. And some of it is luck. It’s design, it’s smarts, but it’s a lot of luck.

You quote a former engineer at one point as saying that Zuckerberg just “doesn’t believe in privacy.” In the wake of the recent privacy scandal, do you think that’s true?

What we’ve seen lately isn’t even outrage from users — it’s a reasonable pushback from the experts, like journalists, privacy advocates, government officials asking about the implications of some very complicated changes Facebook was initiating that would lead to its features and functionality being available across the Internet. I think Mark did begin to recognize that those complaints were largely justified, and that he had to take them seriously and redesign the privacy settings.

Does he believe in privacy? I think the answer’s yes — he believes that people have the right to keep control of where their data flows on the Internet, and I think he would argue that Facebook was the very first major service that really gave you control over that. As opposed to Google, which basically has the attitude that they will observe you without your knowledge, and sell data about you to their advertisers. With Facebook, it’s a blank slate — you decide what information goes where, and I think there’s no place else you would have that confidence. I think that raised expectations that Facebook would keep their standards extremely high for how that data was handled.

I do think Zuckerberg has made some big mistakes in the past. The Beacon episode [in which an advertising tool broadcasted information about its users' activity on other websites] was one instance where they clearly did not design a service properly, and it really did exploit and abuse information about individuals and they had to ultimately turn that off entirely. Even he, today, admits they totally screwed up on Beacon.

But he also thinks fewer and fewer people are really going to want or need the new privacy controls.

I think Mark believes we are entering a world where we are all becoming more and more comfortable with information about us being disclosed. Scott McNealy [co-founder of Sun Microsystems] said 10 years ago, “You have no privacy, get over it.” I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing, but it’s almost inarguable because of the nature of a marketing-led society, the nature of consumerism, the nature of the Internet.

Look, Facebook has photos, and a lot of people can see them, but you can put protections on them. Whereas you could take a picture of me walking down the street, and put it on Flickr and put my name on it, and it would show up in a Google search of me and there would be nothing I could do about it, There are cameras pointing at us everywhere we go in modern life. Google has Street View, and they drive a truck down the street and they take a picture of your house and they don’t ask your permission. This is the world we live in, and information is getting out, period, end of story. Mark observed that long ago, and he’s been designing Facebook for that world all along.

There was a lot of hype about “Quit Facebook Day,” when all these people pledged to cancel their accounts on May 31 of this year, and not very many people actually wound up quitting. Do you think a mass Facebook exodus is even possible at this point?

I do think people could leave Facebook en masse. They could screw up on privacy enough, or the government could force them to do things that are awkward enough that it becomes a pain in the neck to use, and people just leave — that’s the nature of the Internet. But for the moment, most of what you do on Facebook can’t really be replicated anywhere else, and the network effect — the more people that are on there, the more people want to be on there — acts as this sort of intrinsic sort of glue holding the thing together.

Then there’s a switching cost: Once you’ve established this whole network of friends and put data and photos up there, to reassemble that elsewhere is a heck of a lot of work. So even if there were another platform that came along that enabled you to do that, I don’t think it’s something most people would want to do. I see Facebook remaining the colossus of social networking for the foreseeable future.

Having spent so much time in the company headquarters, what surprised you the most?

I didn’t know how many older people had come and gone over the company’s history. Particularly in 2005 and 2006, there was a revolving door of experienced technology executives coming in and staying for six or nine months, and then getting fed up because they thought Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t focusing enough on making a profit, or they didn’t like the culture, or it became obvious that they weren’t going to ever get to run the company. There’s a really intellectual, capable group of leaders there, and they share the same values. Profit has really never been the primary goal of the people building the product at Facebook.

You emphasize in the book that Facebook has a wide range of uses. It can be used to create everything from Darfur protests to “If this group reaches 100,000 people my boyfriend will quit World of Warcraft.” Do you think Facebook is a force for good?

On balance, I have to say my view of Facebook is as a positive force in modern life. I think it’s a new form of communication, of exchanging information, and that leads to good stuff. It certainly has allowed people to organize politically more efficiently, and I think over time Facebook and other similar tools will change the nature of politics and democracy.

I think we’re just seeing the beginning stages of that. If you are upset about something anywhere in the world today and you want to protest it Facebook is likely the first place you’re going to go, because it lets you aggregate a bunch of people who agree with you faster than any other means — and that’s whether you’re protesting a new parking lot in a small town in New Zealand, or the government repression of election results in Iran. Or showing your support for Sarah Palin — who’s the second most popular politician on Facebook after Barack Obama, and a master user of Facebook. I think it’s a tool that helps people connect with other people, and that is almost inevitably a good thing. To that degree, I’m a believer.

What do you know about the company’s plans for the future?

They’ve been pretty explicit that their goal is to become infrastructure that lives across the Internet, where you maintain your identity and make every Internet experience social, where you bring your friends with you everywhere you go — both on the Internet and on our mobile devices — whether you’re making commercial transactions, consuming media, expressing opinion, or just walking down the street. Facebook sees itself as being in the position as a company to facilitate the socialization of all modern experience. It sounds grandiose, but I think that’s where they see themselves headed.