名人饮食怪癖 Four eccentric eating habits of influential figures

3. Gerald Ford’s Strange Lunch 杰拉尔德•福特的奇怪午餐

It is a commonly cited piece of trivia that President Richard Nixon ate a daily lunch of cottage cheese covered in ketchup. After he was elected president, an article in the Washingtonian quipped that elegant White House dinners had been replaced by cottage cheese and ketchup. He even had cottage cheese with pineapple slices for lunch on the day that he announced his resignation from the presidency.

Less commonly known is that President Gerald Ford was also an aficionado of the bizarre but strangely appealing lunch menu item, which he consumed every day while reading or working. An Air Force One staffer revealed in the book Inside the White House:

President Ford had A-1 sauce and ketchup, mostly A-1 sauce, with the cottage cheese. We always had a vegetable garnish with spring onions, celery sticks, radishes. We always served ketchup and A-1 sauce with it. In most cases, he used A-1 sauced mixed in. . . When we were going to land, he used mouthwash because of the onions.

Ford also liked a drink, although he could usually handle his alcohol. He once got drunk on martinis on Air Force One while returning from a meeting with the Soviet premier. That same staffer said, “We put him to bed. In the middle of the flight, he came out in his underwear and said ‘Where is the head?’ Normally, he knew where the head is. He could walk. He was slurring words. It was the one time he overindulged and was tipsy.”