I came across this alarming bit of information about railroad tycoon Jim Brady’s eating habits:
Read the whole thing. That was just his breakfast. Photos of Diamond Jim portray a fellow certainly generous in the waist area, but far from can’t-get-through-my-bedroom-door obese.
Can a human being really take in this amount of food every day? Or is the legend of Diamond Jim just a bunch of bullhockey? I’d be interested in some scientific opinions on this.
Well, when he died he was found to have a stomach 3X the size of a normal mans. Probably from years of stretching.
A better question is “How many hours a day did Diamond Jim spend on the throne?” 
Just some anecdotal evidence,
I have a 5’8" 140 lbs male friend with a very very fast metabolism (hold the worm jokes). He can easily eat that much(maybe not a gallon of liquid) and be hungry 3 hours later. I saw him eat a 4-patty burger at Wendy’s with the biggest order of Fry’s and a milkshake, and be “starving” hungry in about 2 hours.
Some people are just like that, I guess.
I wish I was.
sigh
How do we know this isn’t just so much crap? Where’s the proof that he ate that? Where’s the proof that his stomach was 3x?
Yeah, where’s the beef?
[sub]sorry.[/sub]
Lodged in his colon if he’s anything like John Wayne.
[sub]yeah I know, urban legend[/sub]
plus the cite in my dead-trees edition of Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia.
Satisfied?
Diamond Jim was an interesting old cuss. Even though he was far more gourmand than gourmet, it was a great honor to have him grace your dining establishment and restaurants competed to win his attention. His standard trick was to seat himself 4 to 6 inches from the table and eat until he touched it.
What’s amazing is that his longtime friend Lillian Russell (he once proposed marriage to her by dumping $1 million in her lap- she declined) could match him at some meals.
Orson Welles supposedly gobbled down more than 40 hot dogs at Pinks in one sitting. A techie on one of his movies noted Orson’s frustration that the strict diet his doctor put him on only allowed him rice and boiled chicken. He didn’t understand why he didn’t lose weight, even though he was eating about four chickens per meal.
Unrelated to the weight thing, but Brady marked places he patronized by writing his name in the glass with his diamond rings. It was a huge status symbol to have his signature in your window. (I wonder if any businesses in NYC still have one.)
To be honest, I wouldn’t trust either the People’s Almanac or trivia sites for their devotion to the scout work of historical research.
But in this case, there are better references that confirm the abnormal size of his stomach and the fabulously large meals he at least sometimes ate. I haven’t read it, but Diamond Jim Brady : Prince of the Gilded Age, by H. Paul Jeffers looks to be a solid and researched account of Brady’s life (even if he did make the peripheral errors that one reviewer there claims). And food appears to be a big part of the story.
Ya…that’s why I threw in the F&W cite. I noted the book you mention, but couldn’t access the material on-line, so I made do. Diamond Jim’s size and capacity are fairly well-known, and commented on by contemporary observers. I really don’t know what **samclem ** was het up about, except maybe the lack of any cites at all by previous responders, which would get up the nose of a GQ mod, I suppose.
Not quite on Brady’s scale, but an outsize genius driven by larger-than-life appetites, was Duke Ellington. This story too makes me wonder how anyone could eat so much.
(cite: http://www.depanorama.net/gloss.htm) All this during wartime rationing. The guy must have been printing his own ration stamps.
Ellington also claimed to have eaten 32 hot dogs during a single engagement with his orchestra back in the 1920s.
Not normally remembered as a big man, Duke at one point weighed 250 lb, which he artfully camouflaged in very broad-shouldered, impeccably tailored, drape-cut suits.
He sometimes ate dessert before a meal (as well as after!). He is sometimes claimed as originator of the famous saying: “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”
I’m scrawny and I can easily eat four pancakes, three eggs, four sausage, hashbrowns (the “Tremendous Twelve” at Perkins), and a slice of pie a-la-mode for dessert.
In most cases, I’m hungry again a few hours later.
Granted, that’s nowhere near the prodigious consumption allegedly done by Diamond Jim. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somebody could pull off that much eating, if they tried. The stomach can expand significantly.
Does anyone know how much exercise Diamond Jim got daily? Even moderate amounts of exercise (say, walking a mile or two a day) would help keep him less than blue-whale-sized.
I used to have that God-like appetite… as as perpeturally 150 lbs man in college (even thought I lifted weights 4 days a week), I used to eat like a horse. My friends and I went to a local eatery… the thing was to eat the meal consisted of a pound of beef, a pound of bread, and a pound of fries… all free if you could finish the meal… along with a free tee shirt and your name on a plaque.
Well I’d like to say I won and have my name in the record books… but I literally came up 3 fries short of finishing… before I was puking my guts out all over the beach.
Now that I have an ulcer, I only eat like one meal a day. = ((
Well, how big were the portions? The high class back in those days used to have huge, hours long 11 course meals. Of course, the portions were much smaller, and it was spaced out so you had time to digest between courses.
The meal was giving as one large serving on a huge plate. Though even my my estimates it was doubtful that it was a “pound of bread”… I mean it was essentially a large burger with a bun on the side.
Either way, it was too much for me to handle. = )
I heave learned that Duke Ellington did NOT coin the aphorism “Life is uncertain; eat dessert first.” It originated with Ernestine Ulmer (1925-?), supposedly a writer* from Arlington, Texas.
*A quick Google search reveals that the quote apparently constitutes the sum total of her written work. She did, however, marry a Mr. Haggard and bear four children.
I said “heave.” Hee hee hee.
There’s more to this anecdote than meets the eye.
According to a handy-dandy online calorie calculator, and based on calculations using available modern foods, “Diamond” Jim Brady was, in my scientific opinion, something like the shape of a Volkswagon beetle.
2 eggs, large (158 calories)
3 medium pancakes (312 calories)
2 2.5z pork chops (332 calories)
2 pieces cornbread (396 calories)
2 cup hash browns (326 calories)
2 muffins (187 calories)
1 steak 3.5z (201 calories)
128oz orange juice (1743 calories)
This totals 3,655 calories, not including the hominy as specified, also not including dozens of clams or oysters, nor anything else to eat that day. If he ate like this once per day and had nothing else he’d be about 350 pounds.
If “Diamond Jim” Creosote ate like this for 3 meals every day for some length of time, we would know him as one of the fattest men in history at somewhere near 1100 pounds. Therefore, something must be wrong with the information as we understand it, or with the calculations as I made them.
a) The eggs of yesteryear may have had a different caloric content due to modern poultry-raising techniques. Were chickens of that era corn-fed, free-ranged, or what?
b) The pancakes might have been much smaller than the calorie calculator assumed; perhaps they were palm-sized or smaller instead of massive flabby Denny’s-style cakezillas.
c) Pigs may have been raised differently, to be more muscle tissue and less fatty, lowering calorie content. Also, I may have the portion sizes incorrect.
d) Cornbread in the day might not have used enriched flour or corn meal?
e) What did they fry the potatoes in and how much of them did he have?
f) What was the muffin recipe?
g) I couldn’t find “beefsteak” listed, so the obvious error here is to find the exact recipe for what he ate and how many calories it has.
h) This is the big one. All of the above is just nit-picking compared to the 1700 calorie whopper of calories by OJ. Of course, even assuming that the OJ of the day was freshly squeezed and about 50% of the calories (no added sugars), it’s still easily the biggest part of this one meal (not including any other meals of the day). Was it possible that the “gallon of orange juice” is either a humorously exaggerated estimate? Or was the term “gallon” as used back then not what we know today as 128 fluid ounces? As nearly as I can tell, our definition of a gallon (for liquid measure) was standardized in the 19th century as the volume of a cylinder 6 inches long by 7 inches in diameter and hasn’t changed since.
Unscientific conclusion: he ate a lot of food back then, by the standards of the day. Those standards either no longer apply precisely because the portion size or caloric content of the food no longer matches our thinking of today; or he only ate once a day and weighed 350 pounds; or he only ate like this occasionally to impress people; or this kind of eating was a habit but “Diamond Jim” was really “Porcelain Jim” when nobody was looking.
I know this is GQ and my unsupported supposition is just that, but that list sounds like food ordered, and not necessarily food consumed. I doubt anyone was chastening Diamond Jim to clean his plate. He was a rich man given to conspicuous consuption, and a trencherman of no small capacity, but I doubt he was bent on self destruction through calories.