Presidential Food Favs

Monday is Presidents’ Day so we elected to pick out a few notable favorite foods of our nation’s leaders:

🍒 George Washington
Our first president loved the simple pleasures in food - fish, nuts, and various fruits. But his favorite food that rose above the rest was said to be cherries. His fruit orchard in Mount Vernon provided plenty of the delicious red fruits.

🥒 John Adams
President Adams loved pickles as part of his daily food pyramid. He was in good company along with Thomas Jefferson who also loved them so much he wrote “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar,” which sounds pretty nice to us!

🦅 Thomas Jefferson
A trip to Italy and France led Jefferson to fall in love with macaroni and cheese to the point that he worked to procure a macaroni-making machine. The popularity of the dish grew as Jefferson would regularly serve it at presidential dinners.

🎩 Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was no stranger to helping in the kitchen as he grew up in a one-room log cabin (where you can’t really get away from the kitchen) and it was said that in his adult years he’d don an apron and help Mary Todd make dinner in the evenings. One of his favorite treats were gingerbread cookies year-round. He apparently liked their heartiness and it wasn’t uncommon for him to stuff a few in his pockets as a mobile snack.

🥪 Franklin D. Roosevelt
When he wasn’t working to pull the US out of the Great Depression, Roosevelt loved foods “he could dig into”, according to his housekeeper, and one of those foods was a grilled cheese sandwich. His love for them was well-documented and there are diners today that still serve the sandwiches named in his honor.

🥣 John F. Kennedy
It was said that JFK “dearly loved” Boston clam chowder prepared in the traditional New England style. In fact, his lunch usually centered around soup of some kind with a sandwich and fresh fruit on the side.

🇺🇲 Richard Nixon
Cottage cheese was Nixon’s food of choice and, oddly enough, he liked it with a dollop of ketchup on top. He’d often reach for that concoction for breakfast and even had cottage cheese with pineapple as his last lunch before announcing his resignation in 1974.

🍬 Ronald Reagan
It was no secret that Reagan loved jelly beans, Jelly Belly being his favorite brand. He had a contract with the maker of Jelly Belly to keep the presidential offices stocked with more than 300,000 jelly beans each month.