Was it just my imagination or was there a little bit of Hollywood at the launch of Rebecca Harrington’s “celebrity diet journalism” book I’ll Have What She’s Having? There were definitely some air kisses being thrown about. There was definitely more blonde hair dye than I typically see in Dumbo. And I’m not going to lie; there were definitely some people there who looked like they hadn’t had a decent sandwich in a while.

But lest we feel too out of place (for, it’s true, we don’t typically spend much time thinking about dieting here at Pitchknives), the charming Ms. Harrington immediately put us at ease by explaining why she embarked on the project of trying a bunch of weirdo celebrity diets. It was not because she wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe. It was because she was perusing a website about William Howard Taft’s possible sleep apnea (naturally enough), and she happened upon his diet regimen from 1905, which called for boiled fish for breakfast, mutton for lunch and a lamb chop for dinner. That, she thought, was too weird not to try.

Subsequently, she embraced all kinds of other curious culinary schemes of the rich and famous, like Karl Lagerfeld’s endless cans of Diet Coke and Elizabeth Taylor’s tuna salad recipe. (In case you want to tuna it up like Liz: “First you take a can of tuna. Then you take tomato paste. Then you take a grapefruit…” at which point, sorry, the entire audience was gagging too loud for me to hear the rest of the recipe.) Some items were not as bad as she anticipated, like Marilyn Monroe’s raw eggs in milk: “Not that bad. Just like bad eggnog.”  But particularly repulsive to Harrington was Greta Garbo’s celery loaf recipe (“Why? Just…why?”), and so free samples of this gem had been prepared for the audience. Continue reading →