We all like to indulge our appetites every now and then. Maybe eat a bit more than we should. Maybe try out something new or exotic, or maybe simply ravage an entire pint of delicious ice cream in one go. Well, compared to the next ten entries, we’re not even playing in the same ballpark.
10. William Buckland
We start off with William Buckland, famed English theologian, geologist, paleontologist, and Dean of Westminster. In 1824, he wrote the first complete account of a dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus. However, it was his relationship with non-extinct or extant animals that we are concerned with.
Buckland wanted to eat everything. It was literally his life’s ambition to eat one of every animal on the planet, like some kind of bizarre mash-up between Noah and Hannibal Lecter. Because, as he taught his students at Oxford, the stomach “rules the world. The great ones eat the less, the less the lesser still!
Buckland’s position with the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals allowed him to import all sorts of exotic animals to the country. Hedgehogs, panthers, crocodiles, ostrich, porpoises – they all made their way to his dining table. The worst thing he tasted was apparently blue bottles, while mice on toast were his go-to snack.
By far the strangest story involving Buckland’s bizarre appetite concerns the mummified heart of a French king, but this one is in the “maybe” pile as to whether it actually happened or not. In 1848, while visiting Lord Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, Buckland was presented with a preserved heart in a silver casket, said to be that of King Louis XIV. Unable to restrain himself, the theologian immediately gobbled it up in front of his shocked audience.
9. John Montagu
Compared to everyone else on this list, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, had quite tame eating habits. However, they were still unusual for that time and he is much better remembered nowadays for them than for anything else he did, despite the fact that he held the positions of Postmaster General, Secretary of State, and First Lord of the Admiralty during his lifetime.
John Montagu gave his name to one of the most common, versatile, and popular foods of all time – the humble sandwich. There is no doubt that he popularized it, but did Montagu actually invent the sandwich? Well, no. It is such a basic snack that it has existed, one way or another, for a long time before the earl, but we have no idea who actually was its creator. The practice is, at least, 2,000 years old, as an account of Rabbi Hillel the Elder making sandwiches exists dating back to the 1st century BC.
As to how exactly Montagu became associated with the sandwich, the story goes that he was such an inveterate gambler that he asked for some simple sustenance in the form of meat between two slices of bread so that he wouldn’t have to get up from the card table. A more flattering version claims that Montagu was such a dedicated man that he ordered sandwiches at his desk so he wouldn’t have to stop working.
8. Nicholas Wood
While Buckland consumed strange food for his own gratification, other people managed to turn it into a career. At first glance, Nicholas Wood looked like a typical 17th-century English farmer. However, when it was lunchtime, the man could easily put away 60 eggs, multiple pies, and a hefty chunk of lamb, and still hunger for more. No wonder, though, that he became known as the Great Eater of Kent.
At first, Wood did this to impress the fellas down at his local inn, but he soon realized that he could turn his prodigious appetite into a sideshow act for fairs and festivals. He even got booked every now and then as entertainment for a nobleman’s banquet or two. Wood particularly attracted the attention of poet John Taylor, who gave us the most detailed account of Wood’s eating prowess in a pamphlet he wrote with the catchy name “The Great Eater, of Kent, or Part of the Admirable Teeth and Stomach Exploits of Nicholas Wood, of Harrisom in the County of Kent His Excessive Manner of Eating Without Manners, In Strange and True Manner Described.”
Taylor was so impressed that he wanted to become Wood’s manager and bring him to London. At first, the “Kentish Tenterbelly,” as the poet called him, agreed, but he got cold feet and backed out. From that point on, Taylor no longer mentioned his feasting feats and the Great Eater of Kent disappeared from the annals of history.
7. Apicius
Although we don’t know much about Apicius, we do know that he lived in Rome sometime during the 1st century, that he had extravagant tastes when it came to food, and that he had the wealth to indulge in them. There is even a Roman cookbook named after him, better known as De re Culinaria, although it is a collection of collected recipes and it is impossible to tell how many were contributed by Apicius himself.
Some of the gourmet dishes recommended by Apicius included stuffed mice, jellyfish omelets, and dolphin meatballs. The tastiest food, however, was something a bit more commonplace – pork or goose liver. The best way to prepare it involved feeding the animal dry figs until it was stuffed and then making it drink “mead or honyed wine” until it keeled over dead. According to Apicius, there was no other “flesh of any other living creature, that yeeldeth more store of dishes to the maintenance of gluttonie, than this.”
Apicius is also credited with creating the most decadent dish of that era, which, for Roman times, is really saying something – the lark tongue pie. The reason this course was so outrageous was because the lark was a tiny bird. Its tongue was absolutely minuscule and you needed around a thousand birds for a single pie.
6. Andre the Giant
Not all men have large appetites for food. Some of them enjoy their drinks more than their vittles and, if the stories are to be believed, then Andre the Giant was the biggest drinker of them all.
As his name might suggest, French pro wrestler and “The Princess Bride” actor Andre the Giant was a mountain of a man. He wasn’t nicknamed “The Eighth Wonder of the World” for nothing. So you would expect a guy like him to imbibe more than your average person, but even for his size, Andre’s love of all things alcohol was legendary among all those who knew him.
Pretty much every wrestler from that era has, at least, one Andre drinking story. Bobby Heenan wrote in his memoir that the Giant once stayed until 4 in the morning at the Marriott Hotel bar drinking 40 vodka tonics before finally calling it a night. He would often down six bottles of wine just to get him in the mood for more drinking. When he had to stop drinking to lose weight, he restrained himself to only four or five bottles with dinner.
Andre’s biggest drinking session came when he knocked back 119 beers in just six hours. According to the wrestlers he was with, that was the only time they actually saw the Giant pass out from booze, which he did in a hotel hallway. The problem was that he was too heavy to move so, instead, they draped a piano cover over him and let him sleep it off. Andre remained undisturbed until the next day, as everyone thought he was a piece of furniture.
5. Michel Lotito
From one Frenchman, we move on to another, Michel Lotito, better known as Monsieur Mangetout or “Mr. Eat-All.” As his name implies, his appetite wasn’t particularly picky. Lotito ate everything. And when we say “everything,” we don’t mean any kind of food that he could get his hands on. We mean everything – glass, razor blades, beds, television sets, computers, bicycles, chandeliers, and, his crowning achievement, an entire Cessna 150 airplane.
Lotito discovered his unusual skill when he was a teenager. It was a combination of two bizarre physical traits – an abnormally high threshold for pain and an extra thick stomach lining and intestines, which meant that he could swallow just about anything with little ill effects.
He first achieved fame in 1979 when he entered the Guinness Book of Records for eating a bicycle over the course of 15 days. From then on, TV shows, fairs, and festival appearances followed, but already he had started on his most ambitious project. It took Lotito two years, between 1978 and 1980, but he managed to eat, piece by piece, an entire Cessna 150 aircraft.
Guinness estimated that Lotito consumed around nine tons of metal during his lifetime. Oddly enough, it was soft foods such as bananas and boiled eggs that gave him an upset stomach.
4. Elagabalus
Having a ravenous and extravagant appetite is one thing, but also being able to indulge it is quite another. In order to afford such outlandish and hedonistic dishes on a regular basis, you’d have to be a Roman emperor or something. Lucky for Elagabalus, that’s exactly what he was.
Tales of the excesses of Elagabalus have been often told, mainly by people who didn’t like him very much. But there is no doubt that the young emperor enjoyed the finest things in life. When Elagabalus and his guests dined, they all sat on silver beds, as the perfume of amaranth was gently fanned by boys whose curly locks were used as napkins. As for the menu:
“Sows’ breasts with Lybian truffles; dormice baked in poppies and honey; peacocks’ tongues flavored with cinnamon; oysters stewed in garum…flamingoes’ and ostriches’ brains, followed by the brains of thrushes, parakeets, pheasants, and peacocks, also a yellow pig cooked after the Trojan fashion, from which, when carved, hot sausages fell and live thrushes flew; sea-wolves from the Baltic, sturgeons from Rhodes, fig-peckers from Samos, African snails and the rest.”
3. Francis Battalia
Everyone on this list had large and unusual appetites, but at least most of them consumed food. That cannot be said for 17th-century Italian soldier Francis Battalia. We’ll let you guess what his preferred nourishment was, but we’ll give you a hint – he was known as the Stone-Eater.
Like others, Battalia turned his peculiar eating habits into a sideshow performance. In front of a curious crowd, he would swallow large plates full of stones and gravel, and then shake his body violently so the people could hear them rustle inside his stomach.
Unsurprisingly, some people were skeptical and thought that Battalia was faking the whole thing, but he allowed himself to be tested to show that his Stone-Eater act was legit. A doctor named Bulwer wrote an account of Battalia in his paper Artificial Changeling. He claimed that the Italian was monitored for 24 hours, a time during which he not only ate exclusively rocks, but also excreted a sandy and crumbly substance.
2. Tarrare
The third and final Frenchman on our list, Tarrare was someone who, like others previously mentioned, would eat just about everything he could get his hands on. However, he didn’t do it to set records or to put on a show, he did it because his hunger would simply not stop.
Ostensibly born in Lyon circa 1772, Tarrare’s gargantuan appetite started exhibiting from an early age. Eventually, unable to feed him, his parents kicked him out, so teenage Tarrare roamed the streets of France, begging, stealing, and putting on sideshows to try and satiate his unending appetite.
When the War of the First Coalition broke out, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army, but even quadruple rations weren’t enough to satisfy him. He was admitted to the hospital, where doctors were mainly interested in testing the limits of his gluttony. They once fed Tarrare a meal fit for fifteen men, which he devoured without any problem. They started feeding him live animals – cats, dogs, snakes, lizards – Tarrare ate them all without hesitation.
The army tried using him as a courier who would swallow secret documents, cross the border and pass them through his system a couple of days later. The experiment was an abysmal failure, as Tarrare was caught immediately, kept prisoner for a few days, given a beating, and sent over the border.
Back in France, doctors started experimenting on him again, but would no longer feed him all he could eat. Whenever Tarrare didn’t get his fill, he prowled the streets at night, scrounging the gutters for garbage and offal. He then moved on to munching on the corpses in the morgue and was even suspected of stealing and eating a toddler. At that point, the doctors said enough is enough and chased the famished fiend out of the hospital.
1. Charles Darwin
We end with the most famous name on our list – Charles Darwin. Obviously, he was a man fascinated with the animal world around him, and it seems that this fascination also included wanting to know how they all tasted…for science, of course.
Darwin first started indulging in this habit during his student years at Cambridge, where he became a member of the Glutton Club, whose goal was to feast on “birds and beasts which were before unknown to the human palate.” They ate hawks and bitterns, but were left supremely disappointed by a dish of brown owl, which Darwin could later only describe as “indescribable.”
Once aboard the Beagle and headed to faraway lands, Darwin could once again indulge his cravings for rare and exotic meat. Pumas, iguanas, giant tortoises, and armadillos were all on the menu, but it was a giant rodent assumed to be an agouti that the naturalist described as “the very best meat [he] ever tasted.”