"shovel down" is a perfectly valid expression in written English.
It is used to describe the act of consuming something quickly and voraciously, especially food or drink. For example, "Jack shoveled down his dinner before running out the door to catch the bus."
In "Bringing the Shovel Down," he employs a variety of voices.
Quickly, he jabbed his shovel down and diced them into snake bits.
He awoke to the sandy scraping of a shovel down below: Rebecca clearing the walk.
He struck the shovel down on the nape of its furry neck and it fell sideways like a glove.
"You want to talk drugs, let's start with carbo loading," says Wayne DeMilia, this least-known commissioner in sports, watching me shovel down pasta.
How could you shovel down all those carbohydrates, all that sugar and grease and the puddings and nachos and all the rest, without putting on ten or fifteen pounds the first semester alone?
Not shovelling down Toffee Crisps and cheese on toast was, amazingly, a much more effective way to shed fat.
No matter how much coal we threw on the fire, or how many gallons of steaming hot soup we shovelled down, we went weeks without ever being warm".
We reach our destination after five-and-a-half hours, shovelling down our packed lunches while taking in the views across the fjord.
Eating consciously not only adds to the enjoyment of food, but it helps you to eat slowly and to notice how much you're shovelling down," says dietician Azmina Govindji.
In order to prevent myself from punching the insensitive bastard in his fat self-indulgent face, once the event was over I asked him – in a polite and non-judgmental way – about his obviously unhealthy lifestyle: the glasses of wine he was knocking back, the canapes he was shovelling down, and of course the smoke which plumed from his porcine snout.
