Trump’s KFC bucket and the politics of eating

By this time next week, all going to plan, the United States will have decided on their 45th president. We all know what a turbulent, fraught, undignified and occasionally frightening campaign it’s been. It hasn’t been without its food controversies, either.

As the saying goes, you are what you eat, and political pundits have studied the culinary choices of these two candidates in the same way as their predecessors. Barack Obama got a bit of ribbing after Michelle teased him for his strict discipline of eating seven slightly salted almonds every night. In stark contrast, Donald Trump has been photographed chowing down on buckets of KFC. "Mr Trump's presidential campaign is improvised, undisciplined, rushed and self-indulgent," wrote Ashley Parker, in the New York Times in August 2016, "and so is his diet."

"It would rock on the plate, it was so well done," Anthony Senecal told the New York Times in March of this year. Trump's personal butler was confirming the terrible truth – Trump liked his steaks well done. The scorched steak scandal had broken earlier in the year, when US Editor for the Daily Telegraph, Ruth Sherlock, tweeted the news that she had overheard Trump ordering his steak well done in a New Hampshire steakhouse in February.

The day after the tweet, a protestor snuck into a Trump rally in South Carolina. Wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, he sat behind Trump and, when not making faces at Trump's political "points", he periodically held up a hand-drawn sign that read, accusingly, "Trump Likes His Steak Well Done", throughout the candidate's speech. Watch a clip of this steak vigilante in action.

Hilary Rodham Clinton has been accused of being untrustworthy by her opponents, and even the genuineness of her devotion to Ninja Squirrel hot sauce, a Sriracha sauce made by Texas-based fancy grocery store Whole Food Markets, has been questioned. In an interview on urban radio station Power 105.1 as part of their hip-hop morning show The Breakfast Club, the interviewer asked what Clinton never left home without. "Hot sauce," was her immediate retort.

After the interview, she was accused of pandering to a black audience and riding on Beyoncé's beloved coat-tails by referencing the "I got hot sauce in my bag, swag" battle cry of the artist's anthem Formation. "Why do we need to know that Hilary Clinton likes hot sauce, played dominoes in Harlem and rode the train?" tweeted @omen. "Black Votes Matter."

The fact that Clinton's fondness for hot sauce, however, predated The Breakfast Club interview didn't seem to bother her adversaries, delighted at another opportunity to question the candidate's authenticity. In a 2008 interview with 60 Minutes, she spoke about how her habit of eating chillies to help boost her immune system goes back to 1992 and how she built up a collection of over 100 hot sauces while living in The White House in the 1990s.

An article in The Atlantic took a measured approach to analysing Clinton's hot sauce reference. "It does make sense . . . that many young black people might be upset by a white politician claiming to love hot sauce in an interview that was clearly targeted towards them and their vote," wrote Vann R Newkirk II following the radio interview. "...[but] is pandering even bad? Politics often seems to require it." Read the whole piece at http://bit.ly/clintonpanders.

Food as a pandering vehicle has long been a mode of transport for ambitious politicians. A Lucky Peach article entitled "What Politicians Eat" shares some advice Nelson Rockefeller had for political hopefuls, which was that "no candidate for any office can hope to get elected in this country without being photographed eating a hot dog." The article, by Jonathan Prince, outlines some food faux-pas on previous campaign trails, such as when the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry committed a culinary sin in Philadelphia by asking for Swiss cheese to be the topping for his cheesesteak, instead of the traditional Cheese-Whiz. Prince put it into perspective by explaining that this cheese misstep was "like asking a rabbi to grill you a pork chop or a vegan to hand-chop you some steak tartare". Scarlet for you, Kerry. Scarlet.

From David Cameron eating a hot dog with a knife and fork, to agriculture minister John Gummer trying to get his 4- year-old daughter to eat a beefburger for a photo shoot after the BSE outbreak, to French president Jack Chirac insulting Britain by reportedly saying “one cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad”, it’s not just American politicians who have to watch what they eat.

Perhaps one of the most embarrassing food gaffes on an international stage took place at a state event on January 8th 1992 at the home of the then Japanese prime minister, Kiichi Miyazaw. President George Bush Sr was in the middle of a 12-day trip of Asia, and the banquet was being held in his honour. At approximately 8.20pm, Bush fainted after vomiting on himself and on Miyazaw, brought on by a temporary illness later attributed to a stomach bug. It is reportedly the only documented time a US President has ever vomited on a foreign dignitary.

Whatever your politics, it’s hard not to feel empathy for Bush Sr in this instance, and for the Japanese premier who was accidentally targeted.