THIS WEEK saw a gastronomic twist in the usual online outrage mill, as actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s breakfast smoothie had everyone in a tailspin. Paltrow, who explains her lifestyle choices in great detail via her website Goop.com, shared a recipe for the smoothie, which, apart from its esoteric ingredients, cost a whopping $223. The Internet exploded with outrage. But Hollywood superstars don’t have to worry about outraging netizens when Vanity Fair magazine is there to take up the fight on their behalf. The magazine swung into action and portion-controlled the ingredients, ringing them up to a far more modest $10 and some change, the cost for each smoothie.
The whole Paltrow smoothie case got me thinking of celebrities and their unique eating habits. Do famous people eat differently? Is that a mark of a celebrity, an artistic quirk, attention-seeking behaviour or a bane of our intrusive times? Is there a history of idiosyncratic celebrity dining? Turns out there is. Author Stephen King is said to eat a slice of cheesecake every morning before commencing writing. However, there have been no studies to prove that cheesecake battles writer’s block—otherwise, this writer would have been happy to eat cheesecake daily for breakfast. Closer home, former prime minister Morarji Desai was a proponent of urine therapy. He lived to the ripe old age of 99 years, just one short of a century (disclaimer: we have no idea if the urine therapy helped!).
Further, inventor Benjamin Franklin used to be a vegetarian, although he didn’t stay one all his life. As a young boy of 16 years, he happened to chance upon a book that recommended a vegetarian diet and embarked on it with the resolve that was characteristic of him as a leader in later years. He even learnt to cook his own food and developed a lifelong relationship with diet and health. In fact, in his papers, one can find recipes as well. Franklin led a rather modest dietary life despite dining with some of the most influential people of his time.
Speaking of influential people, former US president Thomas Jefferson seems to have been quite the gourmand. In the 2008 book, Dinner at Mr Jefferson’s, author Charles A Cerami details a meal between Jefferson (the third US president) and James Madison (the fourth US president), which was quite a feast. None of the frugality usually associated with founding father Franklin was on display. The meal had two main courses and the capon, stuffed with Virginia ham, was served with Calvados sauce, which was made with an apple brandy that Jefferson had brought back from his travels. Jefferson’s personal chef, James Hemmings (whom he had freed from slavery), cooked the meal—he had been trained in France as a chef when he accompanied Jefferson there. A lucid description of the meal in the book establishes that it was one fit for presidents. Rumour has it that the vanilla ice-cream encased in a warm puff pastry made Madison ‘squeal’.
Our own Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, had a well-documented attitude to food, which might be best exemplified by this quote of his: “Now, let us consider how often and how much should one eat. Food should be taken as a matter of duty—even as a medicine—to sustain the body, never for the satisfaction of the palate. Thus, pleasurable feeling comes from satisfaction of real hunger.”
In contrast, Harry Houdini, the great illusionist, was what we would today call a ‘foodie’. He loved lavish meals and hosted them often in fancy hotels and restaurants. His wife was a great cook and well-known in their circles for hosting delicious meals. His favourite meal? Hungarian chicken, spatzels and custard bread pudding with bing cherries (as documented). It’s a wonder he ever got out of that straitjacket for his most famous trick!
In our times, when we hear about the famous and their food habits, it is usually about the dietary restrictions they place on themselves. Even the lavish meals of the Kapoors of Bollywood are memories of the past. We never hear of their grand repasts any more.
Now, it’s about the next big diet or how many boiled eggs actor Nicole Kidman eats in a day and other such depressing food trivia. The Prime Minister is said to be a man of frugal food habits, famously fasting through a meal at the White House, the most lavish of all addresses. One wonders, just where are we going to get our great foodie stories from?
Advaita Kala is a writer, most recently of the film Kahaani. She is also a former hotelier having worked in restaurants in India and abroad