Trivia book mixes food with fame

SYDNEY — Most children know George H. W. Bush banned broccoli from the White House when he was U.S. president, but not many people realize Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the first people to enjoy banana fritters soaked in rum.

Few people have probably bothered to calculate that opera singer Luciano Pavarotti lost and gained 5,000 pounds in his career or are aware that Elvis Presley never cut up his own food.

But for two journalist brothers, Matthew and Mark Jacob, food trifles of the famous became an obsession, leading to the newly released book, “What the Great Ate: A Curious History of Food and Fame,” published by Three Rivers Press.

The U.S.-based Jacob brothers said they were fascinated by the fact that meals could change history with food blamed for the deaths of various kings, popes and other leaders. Paying tribute to the importance of food, actress Sophia Loren once declared: “Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

The brothers spent more than two years ploughing through piles of biographies and other books to pull together a collection of the culinary likes, dislikes, habits and attitudes of the famous through history. Matthew and Mark Jacob spoke to Reuters about food and fame:

Why food trivia?

Matthew: As food-obsessed as our culture is, you pick up the typical biography and find very little about the eating habits of a famous person. We knew they were there and wanted to dig.

Do you each have a favorite story from the book?

Matthew: I think one example would be Ernest Hemingway. He ate a lot of unusual foods in his life but his father once punished him when he was 13 and killed a porcupine by making him cook and eat the animal. Mark: One of my favorites is the one of astronaut John Young, who in 1965 smuggled a corned beef sandwich into space in his spacesuit to give to his fellow astronaut Gus Grissom.

How about the most bizarre story in your view?

Matthew: Elvis Presley was home to a lot of them but I think one of the most amusing stories to me was one about the ultimate power of food. In 2008 Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej found himself in hot water for violating the constitution. How? By accepting payments of $2,350 for appearing on four episodes of a televised TV cooking show called “Tasting and Complaining.”

Did you find common threads between all these stories?

Matthew: Famous people can be incredibly pedantic about food even though you’d think they’d have bigger fish to fry.

Reuters Life!