Some people have weird eating habits. But none weirder than Michel Lotito.

Lotito ate everything. I mean EVERYTHING. In Amarillo, Texas, he ate a queen-sized bed. In Quebec he ate a whole bicycle. "The chain," he was quoted as saying, "was the tastiest part." In Marseilles he ate a car. A small car, true--a Renault, I think--but still a car.

As James Dent once noted in his humorous book, James Dent Strikes Again, Lotito was not an overgrown termite. He was a human-type person born 1950 in Grenoble, France. He was a sickly child, prey to neighborhood bullies. As a way of keeping the toughs from beating up on him whenever they saw him, he decided to awe them by eating unlikely things. Who, after all, would hit a fellow who had just bitten off a mouthful of brick?

Well, his strategy worked. The …