Chapter One FOOD FOR THOUGHT 10 Extreme Food Fads 1 THE BEAN DIET The Ancient Greek Pythagoras and his followers were among the earliest vegetarians, but it had nothing to do with healthy eating or compassion for animals. According to Pythagoras, vegetarianism was the only way to ensure you were not eating your grandmother or another relative, whose soul could have migrated to your neighbor''s pig. The great mathematician was said to be so passionate about his diet that he met his death defending a bean field. 2 THE YOGURT DIET The Russian biologist Ilya Metchnikoff, winner of Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908, was a depressive who twice attempted suicide. His second attempt was with a large dose of morphine, which only succeeded in causing him to throw up and sit around in a catatonic state. While pondering the futility of life and the certainty of death, Metchnikoff was puzzled by the longevity of peasants in the backwoods of Bulgaria, many of whom lived to be more than a hundred. He decided that it was because they ate lots of yogurt. To test his theory he binged on untold gallons of the stuff, meanwhile boasting extensively about its life-extending properties.

He died six years later at the age of seventy-one, leaving behind just a handful of fellow yogurt enthusiasts. 3 THE FRUIT-AND-VEGETABLE-FREE DIET In 1770 English physician William Stark set out to find a cure for scurvy by subjecting himself to a series of dietary regimes. Stark, a healthy six-footer, meticulously recorded the measurements of everything he ate, the prevailing weather conditions, and the weight of all his daily excretions. After spending thirty-one days on a diet of bread and water, which made him "dull and listless," he moved on to dietary experiments with olive oil, milk, roasted goose, boiled beef, fat, figs, and veal. After seven months of living exclusively on honey puddings and Cheshire cheese, he died of scurvy at the age of twenty- nine. He had considered testing fresh fruits and vegetables but never got around to it. 4 THE GRAHAM DIET Advocated in the 1930s by the US Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, who taught that the consumption of meat and dairy products stimulated excessive sexual desire and "bad habits," including masturbation, which he regarded as an evil that inevitably led to blindness and insanity. The Graham diet consisted mainly of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole wheat, and high-fiber foods, especially the graham cracker, which was so bland and tasteless it earned him the nickname "Dr.

Sawdust." He developed a band of dedicated supporters across the United States, but his diet soon lost popularity when devotees became too weak to stand up, and the remainder lost faith when their mentor dropped dead at the age of fifty-seven. 5 THE PEOPLE DIET Montezuma II, the last Aztec ruler in Mexico, was famed for his gluttony. On a typical night he liked to eat chicken, turkey, songbirds, doves, ducks, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, quail, plus an adolescent boy or two, followed by tortillas and hot chocolate. 6 THE "I''LL HAVE A GATOR SANDWICH AND MAKE IT SNAPPY" DIET The actor Steve McQueen, in the last stages of cancer, lived on a diet largely comprising boiled alligator skin and apricot pits, washed down with urine, as was prescribed by his Mexican doctors. 7 THE BOOGER DIET According to Austrian medical expert Professor Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, picking your nose with your fingers and eating your boogers is a great way of strengthening the body''s immune system. Dr.

Bischinger describes mucophagy-the act of eating one''s own extracted mucus-as "making great sense medically and a perfectly natural thing to do." The doctor also noted that children happily eat their own boogers, but by the time they become adults they have stopped under pressure from society. 8 THE MILK DIET The ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison, ate only cheese and milk products. His term, the shortest in the history of the presidency, lasted thirty days, eleven hours, and thirty minutes. The inventor Thomas Edison spent his last few years consuming nothing more than a pint of milk once every three hours. 9 THE TAPEWORM DIET Tapeworms are parasites living in the intestine of human hosts, consuming the host''s food. As a result, people with tapeworms are hungry all the time but still able to remain thin, no matter how much they eat. Advertisements for "tapeworm pills" first emerged in the 1920s and since then a number of famous women, including the opera singer Maria Callas, are alleged to have tried this eating plan.

An urban myth circulated during the early eighties that a US diet company was offering a "miracle diet pill," and women who took it lost such an alarming amount of weight in a very short time that doctors decided to look into it. When they opened a bottle of these mysterious pills to investigate the contents, they were greeted by the head of a tapeworm. 10 THE FLETCHER DIET Arguably the most revolting diet in history was an idea put forward by an American, Horace Fletcher in the 1900s. He was an athlete who had become so fat he was refused life insurance, prompting him to invent his own diet regime. After just four months he had shed more than forty pounds. Basically, on Fletcher''s diet you can eat anything and as much of it as you like, but everything, including liquids, has to be chewed at least thirty-two times (or about one hundred times a minute) before tilting the head backward to allow the masticated food to slide down one''s throat, accompanied by huge amounts of saliva. Hasty eating, Fletcher believed, resulted in undigested food clogging up the system, which led to constipation and the colon becoming a dangerous cesspool of bacteria (it was an era obsessed by the evils of constipation). People who gave "Fletcherising," a try, including John D.

Rockefeller and Mark Twain, found that they ate less because the chewing took so long, thus diminishing the desire to eat, not to mention the will to live. Fletcher died of bronchitis, aged sixty-nine. Blood, Sweat, and Takeaways 12 SURPRISE FILLINGS 404 B.C.: The great plague of Athens, probably caused by contaminated cereals, leads to the defeat of the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. 1861: Mrs. Beeton''s Book of Cookery and Household Management, regarded as the housewife''s cookery bible, contains several potentially lethal recipes, including one for mayonnaise made with raw eggs. Mrs.

Beeton will go to her grave at age twenty-eight knowing nothing of salmonella. 1983: In August, the Times of London reports that a man living in West Germany found a human finger in his bread roll. In 2004 a man found part of a thumb in his sandwich, and in 2005 a whole finger was discovered in some frozen custard. 1992: A unique case of food contamination occurs in October, when nine people complain that Linda McCartney''s famous brand of vegetarian pies had been "spiked" with steak and kidney. 1992: An American bread company is taken to court after a woman in Los Angeles finds a used condom in a large loaf. 1997: A British couple from Carlisle, Northumbria, find a six-inch bloodstained hypodermic needle inside a half-eaten loaf of bread purchased from a local supermarket. 1997: Dalvin Stokes sues a cafeteria in Winter Haven, Florida, after finding a condom in his sweet potato pie. 2000: An intact human head turns up inside a large cod for sale in a fishmonger''s store in Queensland, Australia.

Police determine that the head belonged to a thirty-nine-year-old trawler fisherman missing after falling overboard about thirty-one miles out a few days earlier. 2005: A human penis turns up in a bottle of ketchup in Stockholm, Sweden. Housewife Viktoria Ed, who discovered the organ while putting the sauce on bread rolls for her husband, Stefan, and their children, Madeleine and Simon, described it as "medium size." The Godegaarden brand ketchup was made in Turkey and distributed in Sweden by the company Axfood. Ed commented, "I will never buy this brand again, it''s finished." 2008: A woman from Wisconsin tries to extort money from an expensive restaurant by putting a rat in her lunch. Debbie Miller, forty-three, threatened to alert the media unless The Seasons gave her $500,000. Instead of paying up, the owners turned it over to investigators, who smelled a rat when they determined that it had in fact been cooked in a microwave: The restaurant doesn''t use microwaves.

Miller is later found guilty of planting the rodent. 2008: Two UK shopowners are fined for selling chocolate cake that had been sprinkled with human feces. A customer alerted the authorities after sampling the foul-smelling gateaux and noticing that it didn''t taste or smell "quite right." Saeed Hasmi and Jan Yadgari, who ran the Italiano Pizzeria in Roath, Cardiff, were fined £1,500 for selling food unfit for human consumption. 2009: A cook from New Jersey is found guilty of putting hair in the bagel sandwich of a police officer who had given him a ticket. The officer had ticketed the cook when he failed to pull over for a traffic violation. Police asked the local press not to report the incident for fear of copycat crimes, but the paper published the story anyway. Gluttons for Punishment 12 MORE FOOD-RELATED DEATHS 488 B.

C.: Anacreon, Greek poet and composer of drinking songs, chokes to death on a grape stone. 230 B.C.: The Roman senator Fabius chokes to death on a single goat hair that h.