Portraits by Other Means

The Diets of Others

The Diets of Others

We are what we eat. In my case, I am a Clif bar, black cherry-almond. My mother calls my diet The Lance Armstrong Lite Diet. I tell her, at least it’s not The Terrorist Diet.

The Terrorist Diet

[In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden] no longer slaughtered a lamb every day to serve his guests; now he rarely ate meat, preferring to live on dates, milk, yoghurt and flatbread.

The Founding Father Diet

As well as saying that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away,” [Benjamin] Franklin consistently asked his wife Deborah to ship him barrels of apples while he lived abroad: “Goodeys I now and then get a few; but roasting Apples seldom, I wish you had sent me some; and I wonder how you, that used to think of everything, came to forget it. Newton Pippins would have been the most acceptable.

The Ambiguously Human Diet

The [Karl Lagerfeld diet] book includes recipes for dishes such as fish soufflé, quail flambé, ham and raspberry mousse, vegetables in aspic, and roast guinea fowl with tarragon. One meal per day must consist of Slim Fast-style “protein sachets,” available in delectable flavors like “cream soup,” “egg-based custard,” and “bread and cakes.”

The Supreme Court Diet

Rather than dining out for lunch, [David Souter] usually has yogurt and an apple at his desk. “And he eats the apple the old-fashioned New England way: He eats it right through the core,” [Souter’s friend Thomas] Rath said. “There is nothing left but the stem.”

The NBC News Anchor Diet

Q: What do you eat during the evening?

Brian Williams: “Banana-flavored Power Bars, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, carrot sticks, Coke, Red Bull, Propel (grape flavor). I have the food and drink habits of an 11-year-old. Always have. Always will.

The Fashion Editrix Diet

[Anne Slowey’s] morning vitamin routine: Two 1,000-mg. Emergen-C with seven mineral ascorbates and 32 mineral complexes, one ounce of Super KMH, Mona Vie (berry extract), aloe juice, chlorophyll, two Nature’s Way Fenu-Thyme, one advance natural FloroMax, three Wellness Formula tablets, 20 drops Super Lysine Plus, two Theraveda Usha daytime stress formula tablets.

The Sex Diet

After doing it, [Tiger] Woods liked to eat Froot Loops and watch cartoons, [mistress and exotic dancer Cori Rist] says.

The World’s Most Amazing Mom Diet

While in Cambodia, Angelina Jolie encouraged her son, Maddox, to follow her lead—“We’ll take our shoes off and walk across the rocks and go eat a cricket.” She sampled bee larvae, which she didn’t like, but she was rather fond of cockroaches, a Cambodian delicacy that Jolie called a “meaty…high-protein snack food.” One drawback of eating cockroaches, she explained, was that “there’s this very pointy bit on their stomach you just can’t eat. You have to kind of pop that off.

Credit: Benjamin Franklin, John Martin Will, 1777, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection

biopic

TMN Editor Leah Finnegan is from Illinois by way of Texas. She splits her time between New York City and her website. More by Leah Finnegan

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