March 18, 2021 • 23 mins
Eleanor Herman, author of The Royal Art of Poison, shares her tales of food tasters though history with Matt and Helen. She also dispels some myths about what was actually killing royalty if it wasn't poison.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is jobsolete. I'm Helen Hung and I'm Att beat
and today we're talking about food tasters. Hey, Matt, how
come you sound different this week? Oh you know, I
just decided to accidentally use a different microphone for this episode.
I can still hear you, so I think I think
it's cool. Okay, yeah, sorry, folks. Then they would put
(00:27):
the dishes on the table, and then the butler would
come around with the gigantic unicorn horn. One time I
got thirty dollars to eat black beans for an hour.
I enjoyed it. I later learned that people do this
for a living. One actually has to have quite a
sophisticated palette to handle such a job, and it's a
(00:50):
rather specialized career. But historically there's another type of food taster,
going all the way back to ancient Egypt up to
some of the twentieth century dictators. A food taster was
a person who tried food that was prepared for someone
else to make sure it was safe to eat. So
(01:11):
instead of the very important person getting sick or dying,
the food taster might get sick or die. And that's
how you knew the food was, you know, bad? I sure,
hope you have an appetite because in this episode we're
hungry to learn about food tasters. I like, I like
what you did there, Matt. I have so many questions
(01:35):
about the one time that you were paid to eat
black beans. How did that come about? And did you
have to eat all the black beans at one time? Well,
they give us little breaks, like they give us crackers,
salting crackers and water to kind of cleanse their palate between.
But yeah, you were in a room with a bunch
(01:56):
of other people also eating black beans at the same time.
Did the room have plenty of ventilation? I sure, hope,
so it was very clean? Is very like a definitely,
the more I think about it, it was an unusual experience.
But yeah, there are people to do this, and actually
you have to have in some cases advanced degree to
(02:18):
be a food taster, a very top notch palette. I'm
glad that you mentioned that in your intro because when
I first heard that we were talking about food tasters today,
you know, I was like, Oh, a food taster is
someone who has an incredible palette and they get to
taste you know, halt cuisine or whatever. And they said, oh,
(02:38):
this needs a little bit more truffle oil or whatever.
But then you explained food taster was a very different
position someone that Joffrey from Game of Thrones could have used.
Am I right? I have not watched that show very much,
but yes, I can't. I can't believe I had to
commit to another show. I literally I I'm not gonna lie.
(03:00):
I think less of you. I think less of you.
It's so good, mate. The food tasting scene is so crazy.
Oh man, for research purposes, should have watched it. Yeah.
So I know you got to do more of a
deep dive on the history of food tasting because you
got to interview an expert. I did. Her name is
(03:22):
Eleanor Herman, and she is definitely an expert on food tasters.
You know, we don't really know when it started, and
I think it was before written history. It probably went
back many thousands of years. Whether it was a king
or a chieftain or the most important guy in a cave,
we really don't know. But there are records of food
(03:44):
tasters at royal courts in ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Egypt,
at Babylon. Wow. So I guess the concept of trying
to murder someone through poison food goes way way, way
way back exactly, and so during its heyday was This
is the part that's my favorite about food tasters is
(04:08):
sometimes it would be a very complicated, very long ritual.
For example, people used to think that unicorns were real. So, Helen,
how much do you think a unicorn horn cost in
the Middle Ages? Unicorns, as we all know, are very
very rare and magical. There's only a handful of them.
(04:30):
I'm going to say the equivalent of five thousand dollars
in today's money for starters. I don't know if you
knew this, but unicorns are not real. Oh, Matt, way
to like ruin a little girl's dreams over here. Yeah,
sorry about that. But they actually thought that they were
real in the Middle Ages. But actually they were narwhal horns,
(04:51):
that's what they were. But but they're still rare because
but they'd wash up on shore sometimes and you know
they're oh whoa, but yeah, you could buy a castle
with a narwhal corn. Wait, so what does this stuff
to do with food tasting though, I'm so glad you asked. Okay, yeah,
so back to the ritual of food tastings. At some
point I would think in the Middle Ages, when pomp
(05:13):
and circumstance became much more popular. They turned the tasting
into a kind of parade with all these servants with
all of their dishes, and then the guards, and this
whole thing became a show. So bear in mind there
was no television, right The most amazing thing you would
ever see would would be a royal banquet, and it
(05:37):
would have been beautiful. The banquet hall would have been
hung with banners, and everyone would arrive bejeweled in their
gorgeous clothes, and there would be servants around uh to
attend to your your every whim. And so the royal
family would come in after the servants have already licked
his plates and ruined his napkin. They even licked the
(06:00):
pillow he sat on. The tasting actually began in the kitchen,
so the people who were cooking and plating and preparing
the food each had to start eating from those dishes
to prove that they had not put anything poisonous into it.
And then the servants came in with all of their
dishes and put them on the credenza and poked them
(06:22):
and tasted them. Then they would put the dishes on
the table and then the butler would come around with
the gigantic unicorn horn. He would wave it over the
table and everybody would look at it, you know, really
carefully to see if it was trembling or sweating. Uh.
And then he might even jab it into the king's
(06:42):
food and into his wine to make sure that if
there was a little bit of poison in there, then
it would magically make it vanish. She paints a really
good picture. While she was talking, I'm like, if you're
the king and you're the last person who gets this
plate that's been passed around and poked and prodded, You're like,
(07:03):
what even am I eating right now? Frankly, I think
they would ruin the whole experience of eating. It's like
you might as will throw it all in a blender
at that point. Plus, if you're starving, if you're the
king and you're you like, you better have some like
in between meal snacks because this sounds like it took forever,
definitely cold and nasty by the time you got it.
So Matt like to be like a royal food taster.
(07:27):
You're always at risk of dying, right if you're tasting
potentially poisoned or botulis um food. Then you're like every meal,
you're like, oh, is this is this the one? Well,
it's about loyalty, you know, I mean, you know, there
was that really strong bond between the servant and the
(07:51):
king or queen, whoever it was. And but this is
before the Enlightenment, this is before people kind of even
could fathom a world where personal liberties were a thing.
Most of the top positions in a royal court, they
were very hard to come by. You would keep them
for life. You were very well rewarded. It was a
(08:12):
position of great prestige, and I imagine they were passed
down in families. It would be a family that was
well trusted and well known at the court. Certainly the
king wouldn't hire some guy off the street to be
his royal taster that much, I think we could be
sure of. I mean, it was a position of some risk,
and for that reason, it was well rewarded and very prestigious.
(08:35):
You know, at the time, hundreds of years ago, that
the king was up there next to God at Jesus.
It was a matter of honor to serve him in
that way, even if you were risking your life. So
it's almost like like a modern day secret service. Right,
obviously your life has at risk on a daily basis,
but it's very prestigious and you're very well compensated. Yeah,
(08:58):
plus the odds of you actually dying on job or
not as high as you actually think. I would actually
think that other careers might be more dangerous. And then
it's more than just a protecting the world leader. It's
also about like almost like you're protecting the position, like
the office itself. It kind of goes beyond just the
one person, I guess if that makes any sense. Divine
(09:21):
right was the way, you know, like which divine righteous
means that not only the king, but those who lived
under the jurisdiction of the king believed that God appointed
the king to be in charge. That it's like they
had direct connection with God, Like God, what's up? Tell
me what's and thanks for letting you know, rule over
(09:43):
these people. God, no problem, you know, it's like good. Yeah,
that's a really good point because if you think that
the king was appointed by God and so then it's
it's almost like a king is a king is an
extension of God? Then yeah, of course you would be like, oh,
we must preserve this person's life, and I am willing
(10:04):
to eat his potentially poisoned breakfast to make sure that
he is. Okay, Matt, I'm not gonna lie. I'm still
I'm still a little bit shook that you have not
watched all the Game of Thrones. But in reality, in
real history, did people actually die because they were poisoned
(10:26):
with food? Yes? They did, and more on that when
we come back. Okay, so, Matt, did people actually die
(10:53):
because people were trying to poison them with food? Yes?
In ancient Rome there was a servant name Halotis, and
he was the taster, the food taster slash butler for
the Roman emperor Claudius. He tricked him into consuming food
that he knew was poisoned. Now, Claudius could have died
(11:16):
from something else. We don't have an autopsy of his
you know, we don't know exactly what happened. But yeah,
it's documented that he probably didn't murder him and who
he was blamed. So I I guess that's a way
to know that your food taster is guilty is if
your food taster doesn't die, but the person intended for
the food does die. It's like, guys, something fishy is
(11:39):
going on here. I don't think he was ever punished,
you know, he was kind of canceled, like his Twitter
was shut down. His Twitter account was shut down. A
lot of public outrage after Claudius died, But it was
more than likely not the case that there was all
these people trying to poison the king. Was probably probably bacteria.
The kitchens were really gross. They you know, they would
(12:00):
slaughter animals in there, they'd string them up and let
them bleed into a bucket. This is well, they're cooking
all around that, right, There were flies, there were cats
and that were there to catch the rats. And it
wasn't just the kitchens that were disgusting and gross, it
was really the whole palace. Now, obviously they didn't have
fleshed toilets, they had outhouses, they had chamber pots, they
(12:24):
had little closet like the trines you could go in
in the hallway. And it's just amazing to us these
days that a lot of these people men, of course,
just just didn't really even bother to do that. They
just dropped their bridges and went to the bathroom wherever.
There's a very funny story about the Portuguese Princess Catherine
of Braganza and she had led a very sheltered and
(12:47):
pious existence. She arrived in England to marry King Charles
in a s six want, and she and her ladies
fresh from the convent were shocked to find men blithely
urinating and wewhere in the palace. And they complained that
they cannot stir abroad without seeing in every corner great
beastly English pricks battering against every wall. Five report on
(13:12):
the Louver in Paris said that on the grand staircases,
behind the doors, and almost everywhere one sees there a
massive excrement. One smells a thousand unbearable stenches, caused by
calls of nature, which everyone goes to do their every day.
So you know, human waste is a source of bacteria.
(13:36):
And and these people in these beautiful gowns, the silk,
the velvet, the diamonds, they were wandering around with all
this filth. The other point is that they didn't bathe
very much. For centuries, doctors told people that if they bathed,
they would probably die because evil vapors would swoop in
(13:58):
the pores of their skin and kill along. And if
you had a nice little layer of dirt, then those
vapors couldn't come in, so so it was just the
filth really, but you know, it kept the royal tasters
in business, right because everybody kept getting sick and everyone
thought we're being poisoned. We need more tasters. Yeah. Man,
(14:21):
there's so much to unpack in in everything that Eleanor
just said. I mean, you know, we we have all
these like beautiful movies about the medieval ages and they
don't show that bit. But I never thought about that.
I mean, I guess I did think about that in
the sense that you like, if you had to pee,
(14:42):
you had to go to the chamber pot, and if
you were a royal servant, part of your job was
too empty chamber pots, which is so gross. But but yeah,
that is a really good point. Like they just didn't
take sanitation to any sort of you know degree that
we take it now, Like they're just peeing and pooping
in the corners and just then going to sit down
(15:04):
to dinner. Oh yeah, they didn't even know to wash
their hands. It's almost kind of a bummer, Matt, I'm
not gonna lie that. If we have all these like
dramatic stories of kings and queens like attempted murder and people,
you know, palace intrigue and people are trying to slip
poison into their food when actually most of the time
(15:25):
it's like they didn't wash their hands and they were
just dying of bacteria from poopy hands. It's not Game
of Thrones, I know, so, Matt, whether someone was murdered
with poison or just died of plain old food poisoning, Like,
how would we even know? Well, they did have autopsies
back then, they just didn't know what they were looking for.
(15:46):
So yeah, Eleanor actually went back and studied the reports
from these autopsies. By the early seventeen hundreds, that is
the time with a great shift. For one thing, kings
were losing their total power. On the other hand, science
was really growing by leaps and bands. For instance, astrology
(16:09):
was becoming astronomy, and the medical field was really improving,
so people had a better understanding of natural illness and
how the human body works. A lot of the fear
of poisoning was because no one knew why people were dying.
How could a twenty five year old eat something, start
(16:29):
screaming and die within a few hours had to be poisoned.
I looked at twenty individuals at royal courts over a
period of about three centuries who were rumored to have
been poisoned. And interesting thing is that royals underwent autopsies,
so even though the doctors of the time had no
idea what they were really looking at, there are very
(16:51):
accurate descriptions, and so modern doctors can look at that
and tell you pretty much what killed that individual, even
though at the time no what he knew. One of
my cases, it was a perforated ulcer, a gastric ulcer
in the stomach that just opened and it was very
painful and she died. So it was just as complete
(17:11):
misunderstanding in medicine that led to this sphere of poison,
and in all of the other cases that I found,
it looks very clearly to me that the doctor had
been robbed because the royal taster was not used to
taste medicine. The kings and queens trusted their doctors whatever
(17:31):
he would stir up for them and hand them a
cup that they would drink it. Wow, that I didn't
even think of that. So if the royal had to
take a medicine like the taster, like if I'm like, oh,
you need some pepto bismol. But the food taster doesn't
need peptopismol, so just you take the pepto bismol. It's like, oh,
(17:53):
that's right for poisoning the doctors. At the time, I
had a lot of power. Yeah, no, Matt, When did
(18:21):
this end? Like, when did the job of tasting food
so someone else doesn't die? When did that go away?
There's more to this story it actually, Yeah, So let's
let's look at the modern era. So you can't talk
about dictators without talking about Hitler. Yeah, Adolf Hitler is
(18:42):
the poster boy for dictators. But he had a food taster. Yes,
of course he was paranoid, just like other world leaders
and most of the dictators. If you look at the
dictators of the twentieth century into century, they are constantly
thinking that people were trying to kill them and take
their place. Hitler was no different. He had fifteen young
(19:04):
women actually that were chosen to taste his food and
this lasted for about two and a half years. The
only reason why we know about this is because Margot
Wolk is the woman who told the story about this.
She was one of those fifteen young women. After her
ninety five birthday in that she she's like, she kind
(19:25):
of just spilled the beans. That's probably good, punt. Yeah,
she tasted his food for two and a half years
and she said that that, Yeah, Hitler was paranoid that
people trying to kill him and that's what that's what
they did. I love that this lady at ninety five
was super casually, low key, like, oh, yeah, you know,
I used to taste Hitler's food whatever. So she like
(19:45):
the last of the food tasters. You think, or are
there leaders today that employee food tasters? Well, Eleanor and
I kind of went into that. I do think that
the job of the royal taster in popular imagination is
truly job salete today, I would call it food security.
For instance, that the White House has its own water
(20:06):
treatment system, it's not connected to anything outside and and
the food is very carefully purchased, guarded. Maybe someone in
the kitchen tasted before they bring it out to the president, probably,
but it's more food security. So Vladimir Putin, maybe because
(20:27):
he's the poisoner in chief himself, he's poisoned so many
dissidents and journalists. It is rumored that that he has
a taster who's a doctor. H And when Putin was
at the White House, there was a rumor that this
guy was in the White House kitchen overseeing the food
and eating some of it. There's also the story that
(20:48):
President Trump is very worried about being poisoned. And that's
the reason why. Sometimes you'll have his motorcade pull off
unexpectedly to summarian of McDonald's, and the driver will ask
for a couple of Big Macs or whatever, and so
he feels really safe eating a random Big Mac because
nobody knows it's for him. I don't think that's why
(21:12):
he's showing up. Let's face it, the guy has the
guy has a McNugget addiction, which is you know, don't
we all will? I was gonna say it's probably the
least of his flaws. Okay. So so there's not absolute
proof that you know, this is a current job, Like
(21:34):
there's rumors that some people might be doing it for
a handful of people, but it's not like a thing
that is definitely a job. Do you have a food taster?
I I don't. I mean, I like, when I get angry,
there better be nobody's standing in between me and my food.
I'm gonna say, yeah, I'm not getting one. I'm like,
(21:55):
just just come on, its gotta go down this gullet. Now,
I might self I'm guilty of pulling off into a
random McDonald's, but not for food security reasons. It's because
you know, those McNuggets are amazing, Like I just when
I eat when I need one. Stat I'm not sure
if those are actually food anyway, but oh, I want
to mention. Also, there are also reports that Ronald Reagan
(22:17):
had food tasters, and President Obama did have somewhat of
food tasters really in office. I actually think that makes
a lot of sense that, you know, there was so
much fear at the time that he was there was
going to be attempts on his life that it kind
of makes sense that people would would that he would
(22:39):
employ a food taster. And I personally know a lot
of people that probably would have volunteered for that job
to be like, oh God, save the first blood president please. Well,
like you're saying about the Secret Service earlier, and by
the way, the Secret Service denies that this ever has existed.
So there's rumors that President Obama had a food taster,
(22:59):
and there's rue rumors that Vladimir Putin has a food taster,
but there's no there's nobody officially in that capacity in
the world right now, which is which does make this
job job sleet. Yeah, it's official. Food tasting is job slete.
Jobsolete is produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots manufacturing
(23:22):
hand Forge Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen
Hong That's Me and Matt That's Me. The show was
conceived and produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and
Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is
Amelia Pauca, Our production coordinator is Angie Hyms, and theme
(23:42):
music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to
our I Heart Radio team, led by Nikki Etore, Katrina Norvell,
Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hotti, Khador, Will Pearson, conal Burne and
Bob Pittman.
This is jobsolete. I'm Helen Hung and I'm Att beat
and today we're talking about food tasters. Hey, Matt, how
come you sound different this week? Oh you know, I
just decided to accidentally use a different microphone for this episode.
I can still hear you, so I think I think
it's cool. Okay, yeah, sorry, folks. Then they would put
(00:27):
the dishes on the table, and then the butler would
come around with the gigantic unicorn horn. One time I
got thirty dollars to eat black beans for an hour.
I enjoyed it. I later learned that people do this
for a living. One actually has to have quite a
sophisticated palette to handle such a job, and it's a
(00:50):
rather specialized career. But historically there's another type of food taster,
going all the way back to ancient Egypt up to
some of the twentieth century dictators. A food taster was
a person who tried food that was prepared for someone
else to make sure it was safe to eat. So
(01:11):
instead of the very important person getting sick or dying,
the food taster might get sick or die. And that's
how you knew the food was, you know, bad? I sure,
hope you have an appetite because in this episode we're
hungry to learn about food tasters. I like, I like
what you did there, Matt. I have so many questions
(01:35):
about the one time that you were paid to eat
black beans. How did that come about? And did you
have to eat all the black beans at one time? Well,
they give us little breaks, like they give us crackers,
salting crackers and water to kind of cleanse their palate between.
But yeah, you were in a room with a bunch
(01:56):
of other people also eating black beans at the same time.
Did the room have plenty of ventilation? I sure, hope,
so it was very clean? Is very like a definitely,
the more I think about it, it was an unusual experience.
But yeah, there are people to do this, and actually
you have to have in some cases advanced degree to
(02:18):
be a food taster, a very top notch palette. I'm
glad that you mentioned that in your intro because when
I first heard that we were talking about food tasters today,
you know, I was like, Oh, a food taster is
someone who has an incredible palette and they get to
taste you know, halt cuisine or whatever. And they said, oh,
(02:38):
this needs a little bit more truffle oil or whatever.
But then you explained food taster was a very different
position someone that Joffrey from Game of Thrones could have used.
Am I right? I have not watched that show very much,
but yes, I can't. I can't believe I had to
commit to another show. I literally I I'm not gonna lie.
(03:00):
I think less of you. I think less of you.
It's so good, mate. The food tasting scene is so crazy.
Oh man, for research purposes, should have watched it. Yeah.
So I know you got to do more of a
deep dive on the history of food tasting because you
got to interview an expert. I did. Her name is
(03:22):
Eleanor Herman, and she is definitely an expert on food tasters.
You know, we don't really know when it started, and
I think it was before written history. It probably went
back many thousands of years. Whether it was a king
or a chieftain or the most important guy in a cave,
we really don't know. But there are records of food
(03:44):
tasters at royal courts in ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Egypt,
at Babylon. Wow. So I guess the concept of trying
to murder someone through poison food goes way way, way
way back exactly, and so during its heyday was This
is the part that's my favorite about food tasters is
(04:08):
sometimes it would be a very complicated, very long ritual.
For example, people used to think that unicorns were real. So, Helen,
how much do you think a unicorn horn cost in
the Middle Ages? Unicorns, as we all know, are very
very rare and magical. There's only a handful of them.
(04:30):
I'm going to say the equivalent of five thousand dollars
in today's money for starters. I don't know if you
knew this, but unicorns are not real. Oh, Matt, way
to like ruin a little girl's dreams over here. Yeah,
sorry about that. But they actually thought that they were
real in the Middle Ages. But actually they were narwhal horns,
(04:51):
that's what they were. But but they're still rare because
but they'd wash up on shore sometimes and you know
they're oh whoa, but yeah, you could buy a castle
with a narwhal corn. Wait, so what does this stuff
to do with food tasting though, I'm so glad you asked. Okay, yeah,
so back to the ritual of food tastings. At some
point I would think in the Middle Ages, when pomp
(05:13):
and circumstance became much more popular. They turned the tasting
into a kind of parade with all these servants with
all of their dishes, and then the guards, and this
whole thing became a show. So bear in mind there
was no television, right The most amazing thing you would
ever see would would be a royal banquet, and it
(05:37):
would have been beautiful. The banquet hall would have been
hung with banners, and everyone would arrive bejeweled in their
gorgeous clothes, and there would be servants around uh to
attend to your your every whim. And so the royal
family would come in after the servants have already licked
his plates and ruined his napkin. They even licked the
(06:00):
pillow he sat on. The tasting actually began in the kitchen,
so the people who were cooking and plating and preparing
the food each had to start eating from those dishes
to prove that they had not put anything poisonous into it.
And then the servants came in with all of their
dishes and put them on the credenza and poked them
(06:22):
and tasted them. Then they would put the dishes on
the table and then the butler would come around with
the gigantic unicorn horn. He would wave it over the
table and everybody would look at it, you know, really
carefully to see if it was trembling or sweating. Uh.
And then he might even jab it into the king's
(06:42):
food and into his wine to make sure that if
there was a little bit of poison in there, then
it would magically make it vanish. She paints a really
good picture. While she was talking, I'm like, if you're
the king and you're the last person who gets this
plate that's been passed around and poked and prodded, You're like,
(07:03):
what even am I eating right now? Frankly, I think
they would ruin the whole experience of eating. It's like
you might as will throw it all in a blender
at that point. Plus, if you're starving, if you're the
king and you're you like, you better have some like
in between meal snacks because this sounds like it took forever,
definitely cold and nasty by the time you got it.
So Matt like to be like a royal food taster.
(07:27):
You're always at risk of dying, right if you're tasting
potentially poisoned or botulis um food. Then you're like every meal,
you're like, oh, is this is this the one? Well,
it's about loyalty, you know, I mean, you know, there
was that really strong bond between the servant and the
(07:51):
king or queen, whoever it was. And but this is
before the Enlightenment, this is before people kind of even
could fathom a world where personal liberties were a thing.
Most of the top positions in a royal court, they
were very hard to come by. You would keep them
for life. You were very well rewarded. It was a
(08:12):
position of great prestige, and I imagine they were passed
down in families. It would be a family that was
well trusted and well known at the court. Certainly the
king wouldn't hire some guy off the street to be
his royal taster that much, I think we could be
sure of. I mean, it was a position of some risk,
and for that reason, it was well rewarded and very prestigious.
(08:35):
You know, at the time, hundreds of years ago, that
the king was up there next to God at Jesus.
It was a matter of honor to serve him in
that way, even if you were risking your life. So
it's almost like like a modern day secret service. Right,
obviously your life has at risk on a daily basis,
but it's very prestigious and you're very well compensated. Yeah,
(08:58):
plus the odds of you actually dying on job or
not as high as you actually think. I would actually
think that other careers might be more dangerous. And then
it's more than just a protecting the world leader. It's
also about like almost like you're protecting the position, like
the office itself. It kind of goes beyond just the
one person, I guess if that makes any sense. Divine
(09:21):
right was the way, you know, like which divine righteous
means that not only the king, but those who lived
under the jurisdiction of the king believed that God appointed
the king to be in charge. That it's like they
had direct connection with God, Like God, what's up? Tell
me what's and thanks for letting you know, rule over
(09:43):
these people. God, no problem, you know, it's like good. Yeah,
that's a really good point because if you think that
the king was appointed by God and so then it's
it's almost like a king is a king is an
extension of God? Then yeah, of course you would be like, oh,
we must preserve this person's life, and I am willing
(10:04):
to eat his potentially poisoned breakfast to make sure that
he is. Okay, Matt, I'm not gonna lie. I'm still
I'm still a little bit shook that you have not
watched all the Game of Thrones. But in reality, in
real history, did people actually die because they were poisoned
(10:26):
with food? Yes? They did, and more on that when
we come back. Okay, so, Matt, did people actually die
(10:53):
because people were trying to poison them with food? Yes?
In ancient Rome there was a servant name Halotis, and
he was the taster, the food taster slash butler for
the Roman emperor Claudius. He tricked him into consuming food
that he knew was poisoned. Now, Claudius could have died
(11:16):
from something else. We don't have an autopsy of his
you know, we don't know exactly what happened. But yeah,
it's documented that he probably didn't murder him and who
he was blamed. So I I guess that's a way
to know that your food taster is guilty is if
your food taster doesn't die, but the person intended for
the food does die. It's like, guys, something fishy is
(11:39):
going on here. I don't think he was ever punished,
you know, he was kind of canceled, like his Twitter
was shut down. His Twitter account was shut down. A
lot of public outrage after Claudius died, But it was
more than likely not the case that there was all
these people trying to poison the king. Was probably probably bacteria.
The kitchens were really gross. They you know, they would
(12:00):
slaughter animals in there, they'd string them up and let
them bleed into a bucket. This is well, they're cooking
all around that, right, There were flies, there were cats
and that were there to catch the rats. And it
wasn't just the kitchens that were disgusting and gross, it
was really the whole palace. Now, obviously they didn't have
fleshed toilets, they had outhouses, they had chamber pots, they
(12:24):
had little closet like the trines you could go in
in the hallway. And it's just amazing to us these
days that a lot of these people men, of course,
just just didn't really even bother to do that. They
just dropped their bridges and went to the bathroom wherever.
There's a very funny story about the Portuguese Princess Catherine
of Braganza and she had led a very sheltered and
(12:47):
pious existence. She arrived in England to marry King Charles
in a s six want, and she and her ladies
fresh from the convent were shocked to find men blithely
urinating and wewhere in the palace. And they complained that
they cannot stir abroad without seeing in every corner great
beastly English pricks battering against every wall. Five report on
(13:12):
the Louver in Paris said that on the grand staircases,
behind the doors, and almost everywhere one sees there a
massive excrement. One smells a thousand unbearable stenches, caused by
calls of nature, which everyone goes to do their every day.
So you know, human waste is a source of bacteria.
(13:36):
And and these people in these beautiful gowns, the silk,
the velvet, the diamonds, they were wandering around with all
this filth. The other point is that they didn't bathe
very much. For centuries, doctors told people that if they bathed,
they would probably die because evil vapors would swoop in
(13:58):
the pores of their skin and kill along. And if
you had a nice little layer of dirt, then those
vapors couldn't come in, so so it was just the
filth really, but you know, it kept the royal tasters
in business, right because everybody kept getting sick and everyone
thought we're being poisoned. We need more tasters. Yeah. Man,
(14:21):
there's so much to unpack in in everything that Eleanor
just said. I mean, you know, we we have all
these like beautiful movies about the medieval ages and they
don't show that bit. But I never thought about that.
I mean, I guess I did think about that in
the sense that you like, if you had to pee,
(14:42):
you had to go to the chamber pot, and if
you were a royal servant, part of your job was
too empty chamber pots, which is so gross. But but yeah,
that is a really good point. Like they just didn't
take sanitation to any sort of you know degree that
we take it now, Like they're just peeing and pooping
in the corners and just then going to sit down
(15:04):
to dinner. Oh yeah, they didn't even know to wash
their hands. It's almost kind of a bummer, Matt, I'm
not gonna lie that. If we have all these like
dramatic stories of kings and queens like attempted murder and people,
you know, palace intrigue and people are trying to slip
poison into their food when actually most of the time
(15:25):
it's like they didn't wash their hands and they were
just dying of bacteria from poopy hands. It's not Game
of Thrones, I know, so, Matt, whether someone was murdered
with poison or just died of plain old food poisoning, Like,
how would we even know? Well, they did have autopsies
back then, they just didn't know what they were looking for.
(15:46):
So yeah, Eleanor actually went back and studied the reports
from these autopsies. By the early seventeen hundreds, that is
the time with a great shift. For one thing, kings
were losing their total power. On the other hand, science
was really growing by leaps and bands. For instance, astrology
(16:09):
was becoming astronomy, and the medical field was really improving,
so people had a better understanding of natural illness and
how the human body works. A lot of the fear
of poisoning was because no one knew why people were dying.
How could a twenty five year old eat something, start
(16:29):
screaming and die within a few hours had to be poisoned.
I looked at twenty individuals at royal courts over a
period of about three centuries who were rumored to have
been poisoned. And interesting thing is that royals underwent autopsies,
so even though the doctors of the time had no
idea what they were really looking at, there are very
(16:51):
accurate descriptions, and so modern doctors can look at that
and tell you pretty much what killed that individual, even
though at the time no what he knew. One of
my cases, it was a perforated ulcer, a gastric ulcer
in the stomach that just opened and it was very
painful and she died. So it was just as complete
(17:11):
misunderstanding in medicine that led to this sphere of poison,
and in all of the other cases that I found,
it looks very clearly to me that the doctor had
been robbed because the royal taster was not used to
taste medicine. The kings and queens trusted their doctors whatever
(17:31):
he would stir up for them and hand them a
cup that they would drink it. Wow, that I didn't
even think of that. So if the royal had to
take a medicine like the taster, like if I'm like, oh,
you need some pepto bismol. But the food taster doesn't
need peptopismol, so just you take the pepto bismol. It's like, oh,
(17:53):
that's right for poisoning the doctors. At the time, I
had a lot of power. Yeah, no, Matt, When did
(18:21):
this end? Like, when did the job of tasting food
so someone else doesn't die? When did that go away?
There's more to this story it actually, Yeah, So let's
let's look at the modern era. So you can't talk
about dictators without talking about Hitler. Yeah, Adolf Hitler is
(18:42):
the poster boy for dictators. But he had a food taster. Yes,
of course he was paranoid, just like other world leaders
and most of the dictators. If you look at the
dictators of the twentieth century into century, they are constantly
thinking that people were trying to kill them and take
their place. Hitler was no different. He had fifteen young
(19:04):
women actually that were chosen to taste his food and
this lasted for about two and a half years. The
only reason why we know about this is because Margot
Wolk is the woman who told the story about this.
She was one of those fifteen young women. After her
ninety five birthday in that she she's like, she kind
(19:25):
of just spilled the beans. That's probably good, punt. Yeah,
she tasted his food for two and a half years
and she said that that, Yeah, Hitler was paranoid that
people trying to kill him and that's what that's what
they did. I love that this lady at ninety five
was super casually, low key, like, oh, yeah, you know,
I used to taste Hitler's food whatever. So she like
(19:45):
the last of the food tasters. You think, or are
there leaders today that employee food tasters? Well, Eleanor and
I kind of went into that. I do think that
the job of the royal taster in popular imagination is
truly job salete today, I would call it food security.
For instance, that the White House has its own water
(20:06):
treatment system, it's not connected to anything outside and and
the food is very carefully purchased, guarded. Maybe someone in
the kitchen tasted before they bring it out to the president, probably,
but it's more food security. So Vladimir Putin, maybe because
(20:27):
he's the poisoner in chief himself, he's poisoned so many
dissidents and journalists. It is rumored that that he has
a taster who's a doctor. H And when Putin was
at the White House, there was a rumor that this
guy was in the White House kitchen overseeing the food
and eating some of it. There's also the story that
(20:48):
President Trump is very worried about being poisoned. And that's
the reason why. Sometimes you'll have his motorcade pull off
unexpectedly to summarian of McDonald's, and the driver will ask
for a couple of Big Macs or whatever, and so
he feels really safe eating a random Big Mac because
nobody knows it's for him. I don't think that's why
(21:12):
he's showing up. Let's face it, the guy has the
guy has a McNugget addiction, which is you know, don't
we all will? I was gonna say it's probably the
least of his flaws. Okay. So so there's not absolute
proof that you know, this is a current job, Like
(21:34):
there's rumors that some people might be doing it for
a handful of people, but it's not like a thing
that is definitely a job. Do you have a food taster?
I I don't. I mean, I like, when I get angry,
there better be nobody's standing in between me and my food.
I'm gonna say, yeah, I'm not getting one. I'm like,
(21:55):
just just come on, its gotta go down this gullet. Now,
I might self I'm guilty of pulling off into a
random McDonald's, but not for food security reasons. It's because
you know, those McNuggets are amazing, Like I just when
I eat when I need one. Stat I'm not sure
if those are actually food anyway, but oh, I want
to mention. Also, there are also reports that Ronald Reagan
(22:17):
had food tasters, and President Obama did have somewhat of
food tasters really in office. I actually think that makes
a lot of sense that, you know, there was so
much fear at the time that he was there was
going to be attempts on his life that it kind
of makes sense that people would would that he would
(22:39):
employ a food taster. And I personally know a lot
of people that probably would have volunteered for that job
to be like, oh God, save the first blood president please. Well,
like you're saying about the Secret Service earlier, and by
the way, the Secret Service denies that this ever has existed.
So there's rumors that President Obama had a food taster,
(22:59):
and there's rue rumors that Vladimir Putin has a food taster,
but there's no there's nobody officially in that capacity in
the world right now, which is which does make this
job job sleet. Yeah, it's official. Food tasting is job slete.
Jobsolete is produced for I Heart Radio by Zealots manufacturing
(23:22):
hand Forge Podcast for You. It's hosted by us Helen
Hong That's Me and Matt That's Me. The show was
conceived and produced by Steve Za Markey, Anthony Savini, and
Jason Elliott. Our editor is Tommy Nichol, Our researcher is
Amelia Pauca, Our production coordinator is Angie Hyms, and theme
(23:42):
music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks to
our I Heart Radio team, led by Nikki Etore, Katrina Norvell,
Ali Cantor, Mangesh Hotti, Khador, Will Pearson, conal Burne and
Bob Pittman.
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