A Rare Tiebreaker Victory in MeatEater Trivia

The trivia crew had just finished the tenth and final round when the scoreboard revealed something unusual: two contestants were tied for first place, and three more were only one point behind. After more than 200 episodes of MeatEater Trivia, overtime questions remain rare enough that host Spencer Newarth called this "maybe the biggest overtime in MeatEater trivia history." The winning answer came down to a single number—the average gestation period of a white-tailed deer—and the difference between victory and defeat was just two days.

The Big Six and a Classic Jabroni Move

The first question of the game came from the USDA's list of the "big six" foodborne illnesses. The four options were botulism, salmonella, E. coli, and norovirus. The entire room answered norovirus, which seemed plausible given how commonly norovirus outbreaks make headlines. But they were wrong. The correct answer was botulism. As Spencer explained, only about 150 Americans contract botulism each year, and only a quarter of those cases come from contaminated food—most botulism cases come from improperly canned goods. The actual big six are salmonella, typhoid, shigella, E. coli, norovirus, and hepatitis A. One contestant lamented that his wife refuses to eat canned deer meat because of botulism fears, and he predicted she would "undoubtedly be one of th