The most common theory is he got gastroenteritis from iced milk, cold cherries and pickles. How would that combination have given him a bacterial infection? Food poisoning?
It sat out in the July sun.
When I was a kid my best friend’s mother believed that eating cherries and milk together was poison. I wasn’t until years later that I learned of the connection to Zachary Taylor.
If Taylor died of gastroenteritis, it wasn’t from the food per se. It was from contamination. Even today it’s possible to get digestive illnesses from contaminated food. We’ve all heard about outbreaks of food poisoning on cruise ships, for example. This type of illness was probably more common in Taylor’s time, since public health systems were primitive (if they existed at all). Medical treatment was ineffective and even counterproductive.
Yeah, it more than likely had to do with the stuff having sat out, but it’s also possible there was something wrong with the milk to begin with-- this was before Pasteurization, or that someone who handled hisa food or the plate and glass transmitted some illness. One of the “flaws” if you can call it that, was how many hands the food passed through from source to consumer in the case of people like the president.
FWIW, he was exhumed and given a modern autopsy in the 1990s, and was definitely not poisoned.
I wonder if the festive food wasn’t very nutritional.
I also wondered if he drunk too much ethanol, but apparently he didn’t… ( BRW there’s a website to tell you about that sort of thing…
http://www.projectknow.com/a-complete-guide-to-the-us-presidents-and-their-drug-and-alcohol-use/ )
The thoughts of one Cecil Adams: Did U.S. President Zachary Taylor die of eating cherries with milk on a warm day? [September 2, 1994].
Steven Wright had a good joke about this: “What are they going to do if they find out he was poisoned? Dig up all the suspects?”
Milk is going to be undrinkable before it’s so spoiled it will kill you. He surely ate somethign that was already contaminated.
I would think that because it said iced cherries and milk, the ice could have been contaminated. Many bacteria and even more fungi will live in a suspended state in ice.
That’s why ice machines have to be cleaned regularly.
Every time I hear this story I’ve wondered who in the hell eats cherries and milk? Even with modern sanitation, have you ever decided to sit down and watch Pawn Stars with a nice snack of cherries and milk?
If that were so, pasteurization (and TB testing of cattle) would scarcely be necessary. Yes, the pasteurized milk we are used to today usually smells and tastes bad long before it becomes remotely dangerous; unpasteurized, not so much.
But that’s all milk that is contaminated from the start, not that’s gone off from being in the heat.
Hungarian sour cherry soup (it is sweet and vanilla-ish) is molto delicioso.