"Diamond Jim" Brady: How Could Someone Eat that Much?

Factual Questions
21

More free-ranged, although not strictly so. Some prepared feed (might be minimal preparation, not like the big commercial feeds of today) plus stratching on their own. Probably very similar calorie content.

Nope. Historically, pigs were more lard than they are today. It’s only been the last 25 years that there’s been incentive to breed them for more lean tissue.

Most likely more of a “whole grain” form of cornmeal.

Typically, lard or beef tallow.

WTF? “Beefsteak” = dead cow. You know - steak A slab of muscle tissue from a cow, steer, or bull. That’s not listed?

Diamond Jim’s “gallon” is the same as ours. I don’t think it’s impossible for a person to consume a gallon of fluid over the course of a meal. A little unusual, but not impossible.

I suspect Diamond Jim did not eat like this all the time - but he was capable of doing so when the urge struck him.

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.
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22

Nope, has nothing to do with upsetting a mod.

I get upset when I see things stated as facts that are unsupported by any decent evidence.

And all I’ve seen in this thread is pretty much later writings about Brady that are unsupported by any contemporary cites or descriptions. Certainly very few cites that were done by scholars.

I know it’s tough to get these for the average person using Google. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They do, but it takes a lot of work to find them.

23

Why are you WTFing me? I listed “steak” in my caloric content as a substitute for “dead cow tissue” under the assumption that a certain weight of dead cow would be the largest factor in determining roughly how many calories it would be. However, it’s not a safe assumption, as there are other variables.

I’m questioning the OP’s use of the term “beefsteak” as a single word. I’m not familiar with how the term was used in the Gilded Age. (The very word makes me think of country fried steak, which is breaded and fried, and not of a nice unadorned slab of meat which is grilled, broiled or roasted.) I know that I didn’t see it in this calorie calculator listed as a single word, although there are plenty of hits for beef+steak, which vary widely in calorie content from 46 calories/ounce to 200+ calories/ounce depending on the cut of meat, how fatty it is, and how it’s prepared, completely apart from what size portion he was alleged to have had.

Soo-ooo… no, two pieces of “dead cow” are not always the same calorie content.

I said as much when I said the size of the gallon has been standardized since the mid-19th century.

Given that the gallon of OJ would have, by itself, been enough calories for an average man’s entire breakfast, I question whether he literally drank a gallon of orange juice or whether some enthusiastic waiter or restaurant owner exaggerated it.

I’m sure he could have had a gallon of water with his meal, but a gallon of OJ is a lot of calories, even freshly squeezed with no additives. It may well have been watered down.

24

All I will say from a Medical Standpoint is that there is enough human variance so that some individuals can get away with overindulgence without grotesque physical consequence.

There are stories from late Victorian-era England about the vast quantities of drink certain upper-class types put away on a routine basis (I’m thinking Barbara Tuchman as one source) that are absolutely staggering. You’d think they’d all have to keel over rapidly, if not from acute alcohol poisoning, from horrendous liver disease and bleeding out from esophageal varices. But not all did.

There are documented cases (I vividly recall one autopsy) of people who drink to excess (but in not all that dramatic a way) and die in their 30s from the effects of alcoholic cirrhosis. There are also lots of geezers walking (or possibly staggering) around, apparently untroubled by a far higher level of booze consumption over a much longer period.

Some overeaters apparently get away with their hobby as well.

25

Back to musicians: Eddie Condon supposedly knocked back forty shots of whisky on an average night.

26

Sorry, no cite handy (books in storage), but have read a fair amount about nutrition. In my understanding, the answer to the question is that, after having achieved a certain weight - in my personal observation, usually 300 to 350 lb - most people’s bodies stop absorbing calories above the amount needed to maintain that weight. The excess calories simply passes through. It’s the people without this escape valve that are the exception and become can’t-get-through-the-door obese.

27

Chapter XIX of Life a la Henri discusses Diamond Jim Brady. The “Henri” of the title is Henri Charpentier, a restaurateur who served some of those meals to Brady. The book is his memoirs, originally published in 1934, and not a work of scholarship, but I’d still consider him a pretty reliable source.

28

I blame it all on high fructose corn syrup. Well, okay, I don’t but I’ve heard plenty of people going on about all sorts of health problems cropping up around the time fructose really started being added to processed foods, in the 60s. Everything from bone loss to heart disease to the obesity epidemic is blamed on fructose. So, Diamond Jim could eat all of that and not be too overweight because high fructose corn syrup hadn’t put his whole body out of whack.

After reading a short biography on him a while back, I think the better, non-tinfoil hat, bet would be he didn’t eat like that every day, for every meal. He seemed to like the attention and even admiration his big eating garnered. It was almost like he ate a huge meal for guests, the way some parents have their children play the piano when company calls.

Fish, you guessed correctly, beefsteak is the same as a hunk of dead cow, plain (broiled or pan fried). Beefsteak was once used all as one word, the same as hamsteak still is today. I come across it fairly regularily in my reading, but then I have always favored early American lit a little more than other periods. I think it started to be seperated perhaps around the turn of the century. Don’t quote me on that, it’s too late for me to call the ag teacher and pick his brain.

29

Ashes, Ashes, my first encounter with the word was in the patter for “Ya Got Trouble” in The Music Man.

30

Fish, I think your concentration on caloric consumption is the wrong approach here. There’s no reason that a person who can consume a gallon of water at a meal can’t swallow a gallon of OJ. It’s the same volume. The fact that you’re talking about 1700 calories of OJ is irrelevant to getting it down your throat.

Beyond that, your body can only process so many calories at a time. Just because you swallow 1700 calories doesn’t mean your body uses all of them. Beyond a certain point, the excess just passes through.

Gotta wonder about indigestion and the runs, but folks have proven willing to suffer discomfort to impress others throughout history.

31

I recall years ago reading an interview with an Australian tennis player (don’t recall who) in which he said that he had been travelling across America with Tim and Tom Gullikson. They stopped at a hamburger place and One of the twins came back to the table with a tray of cheeseburgers but they were all for him. He used to eat 15 to 20 per meal stop.

32

Thanks. That’s the kind of thing I was hoping for.

33

What Broomstick says is also true, i.e., the body (anyone’s body) can only process (absorb) so many calories from a single meal. The escape valve of which I spoke works a little differently. For example, suppose Jim’s metabolic demand was 3000 calories per day (as oppposed to 2500 which is considered normal for a sedentary male) and that he consumed a mere 4000 calories per day. In other words, as many have suggested, stipulate that the prodigious meals weren’t typical. Still, Jim was a big eater (so to speak), so 4000 calories is a low estimate (it could easily have been a lot more). That’s a calorie surplus of 1000 per day. Takes 3500 calories to pack on a pound. Thus, at the end of a year, Jim would have consumed 365,000 extra calories and by extrapolation should have weighed a hundred pounds more. Continuing the extrapolation, after ten years, he would have weighed an additonal thousand pounds. Obviously this didn’t happen, and doesn’t happen to most people. Yet, sustained calorie surpluses of 500 to 1000 calories per day are common, while people weighing over 350 lb are rare. The explanation is the mechanism I mentioned. Which, alas, usually doesn’t kick in until you reach what for most of us would be an unacceptable weight. For people of ordinary weight, a sustained surplus as small as 50 calories per day will produce sustained weight gain of about 5 lb per year (more if the surplus is larger), until you finally either change your habits or hit your weight ceiling.

34

I admit to some reservations about Diamond Jim. However, you are all speaking from the perspective of people who live sedentary lives in residences and workplaces which are kept at optimum temperatures. And many of whom have to be careful not to gain weight (a battle I, too, fight).

One thing that automatically changes the dynamic is that at 40-45 degrees latitude in these here United States, a century or more ago, the warmest parts of rooms - next to the fireplace or pot-bellied stove, from around October 15th to April 30th might be around 80 degrees, but the coldest parts would more likely be in the 55-60 degree range. And many people did without heat - especially in the daytime - from April 15th until summer, and in the fall until mid to late October. Coal was expensive, and so was wood, unless you cut it yourself. If you cut it, that took considerable exertion, and burned up lots of calories, probably more than you’d burn by just eating more food instead.

In those circumstances, it took a lot more calories just to keep body temperatures up. And that doesn’t take into consideration the time spent traveling. When traveling by horse and buggy, the face, at least, was exposed to the weather (closed carriages were not nearly as common in the Americas as they were in Europe). When traveling by train (and one assumes that Brady did lots of that), it was a little warmer, but not by any means the even, dependable ~70 degrees we expect. Some railroad cars would be heated (another potbelly stove), but most wouldn’t, as best I understand it (I am subject to correction by any expert on 19th century trains). And if I am correct, there would be the same temperature gradient as would be found in a room heated by the same means.

I remember vividly that my grandparents, who were born in the 19th century, were very fond of fat (yes, the non-lean part of meat). Why? It’s the highest calorie density you can get, and people used to worry about getting enough calories.

For a more modern example, one set of cousins grew up on a farm in the 1940s and 50s. The father held a job, so the boys did the farmwork, planting and harvesting the cash crops, tending the livestock (cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens), and also tending the garden, where much of the family’s (vegetable) food was grown. As teenagers, the middle cousin (who is an excellent cook, who sometimes does gourmet dishes, so don’t imagine he doesn’t understand any of the concepts) has told me that he and his older brother usually ate at least 6,000 calories per day (four large meals, plus snacks) during planting and harvest (often more, in harvest; the work was harder). And they stayed skinny. How? They were working flat out from sunup till time to go to school, and from the time they got home from school until past sundown.

I, too, have trouble imagining that Brady ate as much as the stories relate in the height of summer (say June 15 to September 1), but in cold weather, he probably could manage to put away at least 3,000 calories three times a day. Dunno about the rest.

35

I considered the thermal effect, but decided it would needlessly complicate the calculation. That is, it goes to Jim’s metabolic load. So, yeah, it could have been larger, but his average daily consumption almost certainly was much larger as well. My point was that Jim could indeed have been a glutton - running a sustained absurdly high daily calorie surplus - without ballooning in weight indefinitely. BTW, The Master has discussed the thermal effect as regards its effect on ordinary folks but, for the reason just stated, I don’t think the article is of much help here.

36

Broomstick, I agree he could possibly have fit a gallon or orange juice in his stomach throughout the course of a meal; I don’t recall ever arguing that it would not fit. And your objection that he may not have actually processed all the calories he put in his mouth is a valid one.

I still hold to my method, because it showed me that either the calories were calculated wrong for a typical meal; they were counted correctly for an atypical meal; or both were correct, and that he didn’t receive all of the calories because he purged himself occasionally to make more room.

That his body purged itself of calories automatically wasn’t something I considered, not being a dietitian, but you have to admit my method got close.

37

Thanks for the link on the thermal effect.

One thing I did not cover explicitly in my previous post was the amount of physical activity expended in the course of an ordinary workday by even the most sedentary of salesmen, prior to the 1930s at earliest. No one hopped into a car to go half a mile, or even, usually, a mile (or more). If the distance they needed to go was inside what people individually considered trivial (which could be anywhere from one mile to five), they simply walked. If they were in a hurry (and had it available) they might ride a horse or use a horse and carriage. However, keeping a horse and carriage “in town” wasn’t merely an expense (which certainly would not have been a consideration to Brady), it was also a certain amount of trouble. You had to use a nearby livery stable, and you had to either go or send a messenger (not a problem for Brady) to get it. Or you could hail a “cabman” (which one sees in fiction of the era, when set in a city). Or, (certainly during Brady’s time) you could take the trolley. However, I’m reasonably certain that the trolley was far, far below what he believed was appropriate to his self-consequence. And I suspect that the carriages-with-driver for hire of the era were probably also not suited to his style. If he walked, that’s exercise. If he rode a horse, that’s not as much exercise, but it can be considerably more than non-riders realize. If he drove himself, that’s even less, but there’s still a minimal amount of exercise in “driving” :slight_smile: the horse.

I’m betting that, inside the heart of any of the day’s cities, he simply walked a lot more than most of you are imagining. First, when he walked, he gave other people a better chance to notice him; they could take in the details of his magnificent self - tailoring, jewelry, etc. If he rode or drove, they could see less, and some attention would be diverted to the horse (and carriage, in the latter case). I suspect that the only accouterments beyond himself that he would be willing to have distract attention from his glory would be when he was accompanied by a not-thin (see below) woman whose beauty (and beautiful clothes and jewelry) added to his consequence.

While I am certainly not prepared to dismiss the possibility of purging, it was certainly unusual between the fall of Rome and the last 50 years or so, especially for men.

Another consideration that has probably escaped the notice of others in this discussion is that, prior to World War II, being fat was not undesirable. Being thin was, as it was generally considered to be an indication that you weren’t prosperous enough to be able to eat as much as you wished.

38

All of what you say is true. So, sure, at that time and place, the general metabolic load was higher. Accordingly, so were the number of calories a person could eat without gaining weight. But the starting point point of this discussion was that Jim had a reputation for regularly eating prodigious amounts of food, a LOT more than other people (i.e., his contemporaries). The OP question, as I read it, was whether it’s possible for someone to do that without becoming can’t-get-through-my-bedroom-door obese. My understanding, for the reason originally mentioned, is “yes.”

BTW, I’m not suggesting that Jim was purging (though others did). I’m saying the excess calories were excreted.

BTW2, what happened to people who didn’t get enough to eat wasn’t merely, or even mainly, that they were thin. It also meant they were short. I’ve read that in Victorian England, one could easily distinguish the gentry from ordinarly folks because they stood a full head taller.

39

I’m not disagreeing. What I was trying to do was to respond to the people who were purely incredulous, and who expressed it in terms which led me to believe that part of their problem was not understanding the context of the era.

And I don’t disagree with that, either. Hard for me to imagine that kind of volume of excreta, but that must have been the case.

However, I wanted to make the point that people living in that time automatically used up far more calories in the process of daily living, without any extra exertion, than most of us use even when adhering to a substantial exercise program.

True, in general. And had other physical and mental advantages, as well. It’s just as hard for us to wrap our heads around the consequences of inadequate calories, or vitamins and protein, as it is for us to comprehend the wretched excess of someone like Diamond Jim, or King Edward VII.