Those who have called the White House home have had some strange and amusing ways of eating. So have many other non-political "greats."
25 FUN FACTS FROM WHAT THE GREAT ATE:
1. Elvis Presley once flew more than 800 miles just to eat a sandwich. But what a sandwich: The “Fool’s Gold” was an entire loaf of Italian bread hollowed out and stuffed with peanut butter, grape jelly, and a pound of bacon.
2. Author Vladimir Nabokov ate butterflies and said they tasted “like almonds and perhaps a green cheese combination.”
3. Alexander the Great banned his soldiers from chewing on mint leaves, fearing that they would become sexually excited and unable to fight effectively.
4. Pudgy soprano Maria Callas became a glamorous star after losing weight because she ate a tapeworm — either accidentally or, some say, on purpose.
5. To help prepare boxer Joe Louis for a match, his trainer sometimes took him to Chicago’s stockyards to drink blood fresh from the slaughterhouse.
6. During a visit to northern Italy, Thomas Jefferson was so taken with the local rice that he hired a laborer to help him smuggle two sacks of rice out of the region — a crime punishable by death.
7. Maya Lin came up with her concept for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial when she fashioned a model out of mashed potatoes in a Yale University cafeteria.
8. Actor Paul Newman was so obsessed with the perfect salad dressing that during a dinner date at a restaurant, he carried his salad into the men’s room, washed it clean and returned to the table to re-dress it himself.
9. Astronaut John Young smuggled a corned beef sandwich into space in 1965.
10. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ate lunch in the same hotel restaurant every workday for twenty years.
11. Sacagawea, a Shoshone guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition, was experiencing a difficult childbirth when Meriwether Lewis tried an Indian folk remedy, giving her crushed rattlesnake rattle in water. She drank it up, and quickly gave birth.
12. Henry Ford feared that the sharp crystals of granulated sugar would cause internal bleeding in his stomach.
13. Salvador Dali painted a picture of his wife with a lamb chop on each shoulder, and later explained: “I liked my wife, and I liked chops, and I saw no reason why I should not paint them together.”
14. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the brilliant Confederate general, is often described as sucking on lemons during battle. But in fact that rarely happened, and his favorite fruit was peaches, not lemons.
15. The Supreme Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, died soon after eating a dish called “pig’s delight.” Scholars have long debated whether it was pork or was instead a food delightful to pigs, such as truffles, roots, or mushrooms.
16. Saddam Hussein loved Kellogg’s Raisin Bran Crunch cereal. One morning, when soldiers brought the captured dictator a different cereal, he protested: “No Froot Loops!”
17. The microwave oven might never have been invented had a candy bar not melted in Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer’s pocket as he tested a tube used in radar.
18. Amelia Earhart ’s manager-husband insisted that she sign ten autographs before having her orange juice at breakfast and then sign fifteen more before moving on to her bacon and eggs.
19. After Tsung-Dao Lee won the Nobel Prize in physics, a sign went up at his favorite Chinese restaurant in New York. It read: “Eat here, win Nobel Prize.”
20. No matter what actress Judy Garland ordered at MGM Studios cafeteria, the staff was instructed to serve her only chicken soup with matzo balls — the reason why Garland called it a “prisoner’s menu.”
21. Actress Angelina Jolie praised a Cambodian delicacy she ate as a “high-protein snack food.” It was otherwise known as cockroaches.
22. While working in a restaurant, George Soros was told that if he played his cards right, he had a bright future ahead of him — as assistant headwaiter.
23. Explorers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay dined on chicken noodle soup and canned apricots before reaching the summit of Mount Everest. Then Norgay buried pieces of chocolate in the snow as tribute for the gods.
24. South Korean researchers spent millions of dollars perfecting a special version of the national cabbage dish, kimchi, for astronaut Yi So-yeon to eat aboard the International Space Station.
25. Novelist William Faulkner had a simple explanation for why he declined a dinner invitation from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy: “That’s a long way to go just to eat.”