That's not what's going on here. Imagine a black hole as the...

That's not what's going on here. Imagine a black hole as the plug-hole in your bathtub (or the eye of a cyclone, since that's currently topical). The event horizon of the black hole is equivalent to the edge of the plug-hole itself, or the eye wall of the cyclone - once anything goes past it, it's effectively out of the system. But before it gets there, it spends a long time spiralling inwards and piling up on top of itself. The closer in it gets, the faster it moves, and the hotter it gets. Due to the mind-bogglingly huge gravitational forces near the event horizon, things get weird. Atoms get stripped apart into protons and electrons, which gives you a charged plasma whipping around at close to the speed of light. This produces insane quantities of x- and gamma radiation which blasts outwards (remember, we're still outside the event horizon so it can escape), bashing into the surrounding material and accelerating it outwards. For any given black hole, there's actually an upper limit to the rate at which it can eat matter, beyond which it would be producing so much radiation that all its incoming "food" would be blasted away.

It all makes supermassive black holes very messy eaters. A substantial amount of material that approaches one never actually makes it in - it's just ripped apart and sent flying.

Somewhat related from one of my favourite blogs: what if the moon were replaced by an equal mass black hole? Answer: things would go on pretty much as before (tides etc. wouldn't change) except that it would now be an effectively invisible speck - right up to the point where it happened to collide with and eat something - at which point the resulting blast of radiation would probably sterilise the planet.