Throughout world history, there have been individuals that could eat in ways both impressive and disgusting.
Some were royalty, famous, or rich, who could afford to eat decadently and with reckless abandon, while others were made famous due to their eccentric behavior when found around food or for the content they consumed.
Check out this collection of ten amazing eaters, from a rotund US President to the King of Rock and Roll. You’ll be equal parts dazzled and repulsed at the sheer enormity of their feats, although I struck a French bloke from the list that ate live cats for others’ entertainment (I had to draw the line somewhere).
1. President William Howard Taft (1857-1930)
The heaviest US President in history, Number 27, William Howard Taft was a huge man, whose weight peaked during his presidency at over 330 pounds (150 kilograms).
Elizabeth Jaffray chronicled her time as housekeeper under four presidents in her entertaining book Secrets of the White House, with the big president Taft being the most interesting of her charges.
“President Taft liked every sort of food with the single exception of eggs,” Jaffray wrote. “He really had few preferences but just naturally liked food — and lots of it.”
Provisioning for presidents and their guests gave Jaffray tremendous insight into the presidential appetite. For Taft, she bought “butter by the tub, potatoes by the barrel, fruit and green vegetables by the crate.”
But it was meat he really enjoyed, with Taft eating a 12-ounce steak nearly every breakfast alongside toast, jams, cream, and rivers of coffee. Taft made sure he did this after some exercise, which according to Jaffray amused the First Lady no end.
Taft was President from 1909-1913, later became chief justice of the United States, the role in which he served until his death in 1930.
2. Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
The King of Rock and Roll was a noted carb lover, often doing all manner of strange things to satiate his food cravings. He once flew from his Graceland home to a Denver restaurant and back purely for the Fool’s Gold Loaf, and 8000 calorie sandwich comprising a jar of peanut butter, a jar of grape jelly, and a pound of bacon encased in a hollowed out French loaf. Whew!
While a prescription drug addiction was the likely cause of the heart attack that killed him, Elvis’ love of Southern cooking, crash diets, and carb cravings no doubt played a part, as he was around 350 pounds at the time of death.
Some of Elvis’ more notable meals included:
- A Banana, peanut butter, and bacon sandwich was his favorite – Elvis could go for it at any time of day, and it was a massive amount of bacon and banana cooked in butter then bookended by two massive chunk of white bread.
- A loaf of bologna covered in BBQ sauce and cooked on the grill for 1.5 hours.
- Elvis party meatballs, which were ground beef balls wrapped in…you guessed it, bacon.
In James Gregory’s 1960 biography, The Elvis Presley Story, there’s a section detailing what a bride would need to know about the King, which reads:
“Note for his future wife: Elvis loves enormous breakfasts complete with sausage, bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, home-baked rolls, and coffee. He has a tremendous appetite at breakfast. His wife should never develop elegant or expensive tastes.”
I’m certain that if the drugs didn’t kill Elvis, his diet would have gotten him sooner rather than later.
3. King Henry VIII (1491–1547)
King Henry VIII was an amazing eater regardless of the era who consumed up to 5000 calories a day.
He died of syphilis in his mid-fifties, but not before having eight wives, beginning the Church of England, and generally wreaking havoc throughout the country.
A fearsomely strong man in his youth, Henry seriously injured his leg during a jousting tourney which left him with a nasty limp that kept him from any kind of meaningful exercise.
Henry VIII deemed water “unhealthy,” (not inaccurate given the London sewer system at the time) and wouldn’t eat vegetables because they were the peasant’s lot.
Instead, the King consumed enormous quantities of wine, ale, meat, and bread in their place. His diet was so out of whack that even at 400+ pounds was malnourished, which meant the open sores on King Henry’s legs (let alone the rampant STI) never managed to heal.
4. Michel Lotito, Monsieur Mangetout (1950-2007)
Michel Lotito, or Monsieur Mangetout (Mr Eat Everything) was not famous for how much that he ate, but for what he consumed.
He ate a Cessna aircraft over two years, bikes, and other things thought to be indigestible, like rubber tires, shopping trolleys, industrial chain, and machinery.
Mr Mangetout thrived on eating as much as a kilo of metal every day for 40 years, first breaking the metal down into bite-sized pieces, then getting them through his teeth and gullet with oil and copious amounts of water for lubrication.
The interesting thing for Lotito, who ate a special diet of herbs en route to eating 9 tons of metal in his lifetime, was that he struggled to consume soft foods such as bananas and eggs because they made him sick.
Lotito’s digestive juices were so unique that he could break down almost anything non-nutrient. He was amazing!
5. Diamond Jim Brady (1856-1917)
19th-century tycoon James Buchanan Brady was legendary in the US for his ability to eat and enjoy the finer things in life. He made a fortune selling railway supplies, which allowed him to indulge in the company of beautiful women, beautiful jewelry (hence the name Diamond Jim), and all the food that he could possibly eat.
The New York Times, who downsized his feats to more normal levels, described Brady as “the foremost eater of the Gilded Age, a serial multicourse gorger (the word “trencherman” always seems to come up) whose excesses were endearing rather than vulgar or, at the very least, endearingly vulgar.”
His breakfast menu consisted of pancakes, muffins, grits, bread, eggs, chops, steaks, fried potatoes, and entire pitchers of orange juice, followed soon after by a light snack of several dozen clams until lunch (lobsters, crab, beef and pie).
Dinner gave Brady the opportunity to show off his wealth and appetite even further, as chronicled by biographer H. Paul Jeffers: “a couple dozen oysters, six crabs, and bowls of green turtle soup. The main course was likely to be two whole ducks, six or seven lobsters, a sirloin steak, two servings of terrapin, and a variety of vegetables.
What a champion.
6. Tarrare (c. 1772-1798)
If you are famous some 400 years after your death and go by one name only, you must have been a notable person. Tarrare was a freak by any measure, whose general weird behaviour and appetite for food made him a focus for the medical profession.
Driven out of home due to his capacious eating ability, the lightweight Tarrare (he weighed only 100 pounds) at one stage was a soldier. He was dismissed from the front due to exhaustion because the strict army rations weren’t enough to keep him going, despite them being quadrupled.
Multiple reports say that Tarrare’s body odor was so bad that a visible stinking vapor could be seen rising from his body.
Tarrare ended up under the care of doctors who would literally feed him all day, with the young man consuming up to 15 individual meals yet still being hungry. He also worked as a traveling showman, renowned for eating whole animals live and pouring food down his oversized gullet.
These days, Tarrare’s over-eating condition is known as polyphagia. He died at 26, not from overeating, but from tuberculosis. An autopsy found his gullet and jaws were abnormally large, as was his stomach, which was covered in ulcers.
7. Queen Victoria (1819–1901)
While only 5 feet in height, Queen Victoria had a prodigious appetite (for sex as well as food and drink), who ruled longer than any English monarch before her.
It’s said Victoria’s love of food and drink came from being deprived of many foods as a child, where she was held under the strict supervision of her mother (also Victoria) and comptroller John Conroy.
As outlined in this History Extra story, Victoria’s dining was the stuff of legend. She ate quickly and voraciously – reportedly eating 7-8 course meals in as little as half an hour.
She enjoyed fresh and primarily seasonal foods, which included a love for potatoes that I can relate to!
Her favorite mealtime seemed to be breakfast, where the Queen always had a variety of options on hand, and in particular enjoyed high protein foods such as eggs, fish, and meat.
Another fascinating thing about Queen Victoria was that when she finished eating, everybody else had to as well. So if people wanted to have a jolly conversation or follow the societal norms of Great Britain during the Victorian era, they’d often leave hungry.
8. John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792)
Montagu was a British Statesman who inherited his title at age 10 before moving on to a long and glittering career in bureaucracy, but he’s most famous for creating the handy little squares of bread packed with filling beloved by parents, kids, cube dwellers, and the hungry in motion across the world.
There are a couple of stories that compete for the sandwich’s origin. The first was that as a committed gambler, the Earl would have servants bring him meat and bread while he played cards so he wouldn’t have to cash in or take breaks that would ruin his mojo. His peers jumped on the craze by “doing a Sandwich,” and that was how the name was born.
The other scenario comes from the Earl of Sandwich’s biographer Nicholas Rodger, whose research found that it was much more likely the sandwich craze came about during Montagu’s time with the navy and his constant need to eat while working at his desk throughout the day.
Either way, being a famous eater that has an entire phenomenon named after you is about as cool as things get.
9. William Buckland (1784-1856)
William Buckland is the guy in your monthly yum cha group who is always excited to eat the bird’s foot. He was also the first person to identify a dinosaur fossil (the mighty Megalosaurus).
Buckland (who was a vicar in his free time) was also the person in government whose job enabled him to eat strange animals from overseas and gauge their suitability for gracing the table of everyone else.
His snack list included crazy items such as jaguar, bears and rodents, crocodiles, bluebottle flies, rhinoceros pie, and even a puppy.
Buckland’s greatest gourmet achievement, however, was consuming the embalmed heart of French King Louis XIV, which had been stolen and smuggled out of France during the Revolution.
10. Elagabalus/Heliogabalus (AD 203-222)
This child Roman Emperor ruled for a short time, but terribly. Elagabalus liked to combine gluttony with cruelty and sexual promiscuity (he married five times and had a male lover Hierocles), and was wildly tempestuous by even Rome’s standards.
Elagabalus’ dinner parties often featured rare and interesting delicacies – everything from ostrich brains, arctic wolves, nightingales tongues, and sturgeon. Unfortunately, though, a lot of these parties were followed by a cruel death, including the famed death of diners who suffocated from the crushing weight of violets and other flowers tossed down from above.
As tends to be the way with these things, Elagabalus was assassinated at the age of 18 under instructions from his grandmother, who had had enough of his wayward rule and flouting of sexual/religious conventions.
Conclusion
There have been some serious eaters throughout history, ranging from the picky and innovative, through to the disgusting and weird. They are greatly interesting people to learn about, with fascinating back stories, careers, and lives.