The Paranoid Facts Page

13 Tasteful Deaths

by Executive Chef, Rycke Foreman

Healthy-living proponent Jerome Irving Rodale claimed "I've never felt better in my life" and "I've decided to live to 100" while taping an interview for The Dick Cavett Show. After the interview, Cavett is reported to have said, "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?" before the slumped 72-year-old organic enthusiast was discovered to have expired of a heart attack.
Brilliant Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was long reputed to have died of "complications from a strained bladder" while attending a feast. In 1601, it was bad form to leave the table for any reason until the meal was over, so Brahe attempted to sit out his malady, with fatal results. Mercury poisoning, murder and suicide are other possible causes.
In 1771, King Adolf Frederick became known as "The King Who Ate Himself to Death." After consuming an enormous meal of lobster, caviar, smoked kippers, sauerkraut, cabbage soup, champagne and 14 helpings of his favorite desert, semla (a marzipan-filled bun served in a bowl of hot milk), he died of "digestive problems."
Served with a pinch of irony, materialist and sensualist philosopher/author Julien Offray de la Mettrie also died of overeating. Expiring at a banquet in his honor, his critical peers were pleased to note the contradiction between "his theoretical doctrine [and] the effect of his practical actions."
François Vatel created the luscious crème Chantilly the same night he committed suicide. Overwrought with difficulties while trying to prepare a lavish banquet for King Louis XIV and some 2,000 guests at the Château de Chantilly, the perfectionist "Maître d'hôtel" ran himself through with a sword.
On October 17, 1814, the London Beer Flood claimed eight lives, with a ninth victim succumbing to alcohol poisoning the next day. Enormous vats containing 323,000 imperial gallons of beer at the Meux and Company Brewery burst, suds-ing into the streets, demolishing buildings and drowning many in their basement homes.
Across the pond a hundred and five years later, the Boston Molasses Disaster injured 150 and killed twenty-one with its tidal-wave, usurping 87,000 man-hours to scrub clean. Approximately 2.3 million gallons of molasses rushed through the streets at 35 mph, cresting between 8-15 feet high, snapping girders, lifting trains, crushing some people and horses to death, drowning others. Residents claim the smell still lingers on hot summer days.
Too paranoid to eat food unless his wife tasted it first--he feared being poisoned--mathematician Kurt Gödel starved to death when she was hospitalized for six months. His death was attributed to "malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance."
Comedian Marty Feldman was found dead in his hotel room in 1982, during the filming of Yellowbeard. Heart failure was the official cause of death, though it was attributed to the drastic altitude and climate of the location, or--in proper comic fashion--shellfish poisoning.
While the tale may have its origins in exaggeration, the Duke of Clarence George Plantagenet is thought to have been executed for treason in 1478 by drowning in a butt of wine, which contains more than 100 imperial gallons. This method of execution was at his own request.
Certainly a candidate to volunteer for multiple kamikaze runs, acclaimed Japanese kabuki actor Bandō Mitsugorō VIII claimed to be immune to the toxins found in the poisonous pufferfish, which is prepared and served to the customer only with the knowledge of its lethal risks. His boasts (and long career as an actor human) were ended after an attempt to eat four fugu livers in a Kyoto restaurant.
Mistaking explosive chemicals for the citric acid he liked to dip his chewing gum in, Ukranian student Vladimir Likonos masticated his way into the annals of the Darwin Awards without a face, which he lost with his life in 2009.
And saving the most revolting story for last ... In 1514, insurgent leader György Dózsa's hunger for the Hungarian kingship was ridiculed as he was condemned to death on a blistering-hot throne, wearing a scorching crown and holding a heated scepter. Half a dozen of his fellow mutineers, starved for a week before his execution and driven mad by the smell of searing meat, set upon and devoured his partially-cooked body before his demise.