WHAT THE GREAT ATE? SOME SURPRISES!

Do you eat to live or live to eat...? I'm Italian, so my answer is a given. But what about famous people, not only famous but not Italian?

Matthew and Mark Jacob have published a new and detailed answer in their book "What The Great Ate." Some surprising morsels in here.

For instance, did you know the fleshy-looking Buddha was actually very thin because of his many fasts. Clearly, he ate to live. Although according to legend, he "ate his way to enlightenment by consuming rice balls." Confucius was writing about his favorite fruit, peaches, 500 years before it appeares in western history. Then there is Jesus who used 5 fishes for one of his greatest miracles. Missing the point of the miracle, some anthropologists have decided they were talapia (eaten in the Middle East for millennia, but only on chi chi American menus recently).

Thomas Jefferson was a masterful horticulturist who introduced the colonies to eggplant and tomatoes. George Washington was said to be a rather dour dinner host who blamed his dental problems on years of cracking walnut shells with his teeth.

Lincoln is reported to have been as down-home in his eating habits as was his general persona. A hearty eater, he once claimed, "I can eat corn cakes as fast as any two women could make them."

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was troubled with recurring indigestion. He experimented with diets like vegetarianism, then later, milk and eggs only. Nothing much worked, perhaps explaining some of his darker conclusions about life. As for Thomas Edison, he was a simple but ravenous steak eater.

What is one to make of the Jacobs new book? Hard to find a message in there. Kafka was a vegetarian...Raymond Chandler a would-be master chef...Ernest Hemingway big on chocolate cake...Jean-Paul Sartre insistent on "unraveling the existential significance" of the foods he ate. Which may make him the least interesting eater in the entire book!

President Eisenhower found batches of vegetable soup a cathartic ritual when the pressures built up...President Reagan loved jelly beans, hated tomatoes....and today's Tea Partiers, well judging from their piously contradictory oratory, they have a hankering for fruitcake!