With the election just days away, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, have been making their final pitches to voters on the campaign trail. So, too, have their running mates.
Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in August, less than a month after Trump picked Ohio Sen. JD Vance to join him on the Republican ticket. Yet Despite the political differences, Vance and Walz seem to have something in common.
They both enjoy Diet Mountain Dew.
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“I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too,” Vance, 40, said of Democrats during a July rally in Virginia.
“But it’s good.”
Walz, 60, traded in alcohol for the diet soft drink after a failed sobriety test in 1995 led to a reckless driving plea, as has been widely reported.
Harris, for her part, appears to enjoy cereal for breakfast.
She favors a bowl of raisin bran with almond milk in the morning, according to comments she made to The Cut in 2018.
Harris is also fond of gumbo, she said in an interview posted on her YouTube page last year.
“I love gumbo,” she said in the video.
President Joe Biden, 81, who cleared the path for Harris when he announced he would not seek another term, has made his affinity for chocolate chip ice cream no secret.
But what have other White House residents proclaimed as their favorite foods over the years?
Here are a few.
Trump has been known to spring for fast food, famously serving burgers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King with pizza when the Clemson University football team visited the White House in 2019.
On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump used social media to share a photograph of himself eating fried chicken from a KFC bucket.
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Just last month, Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, cooking and serving french fries to customers while accusing Harris of lying about having worked at the fast-food restaurant chain.
He also has a taste for Diet Coke, several former staffers have said.
Former President Barack Obama said broccoli was one of his favorite foods, Reuters reported in 2013 — but he wouldn’t say no to a burger either.
During his presidency in 2009, Obama visited the now-shuttered Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Virginia, and ordered a medium-well cheddar cheeseburger with spicy mustard, lettuce and tomato.
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Unlike Obama, however, former President George H.W. Bush didn’t like broccoli and famously disparaged the vegetable during a March 1990 news conference.
“I do not like broccoli, and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it,” he proclaimed at the time.
“And I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”
Bush’s disdain for broccoli later became a campaign slogan for the wives of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
A photo of Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore from the 1992 campaign shows Clinton holding broccoli next to a sign that reads, “Let’s put broccoli in the White House again!”
That suited her husband’s current vegan diet. Former President Bill Clinton was a meat eater in the White House, but he cut out all meat, fish and dairy products after undergoing emergency surgery in 2010, according to multiple outlets.
Broccoli didn’t seem to bother Bush’s son, the 41st American president.
“It’s OK. I’m not nearly as turned off by it as my dad is. If you really want to get into it, I kind of like the top of the broccoli,” former President George W. Bush said in 2004.
Huevos rancheros was a popular Sunday morning dish for Bush 41, late White House executive chef Walter Scheib once said.
Former President Ronald Reagan kept a jar of jelly beans on his desk in the Oval Office or on a table during Cabinet meetings in the 1980s.
Before his assassination in 1963, former President John F. Kennedy enjoyed creamy New England fish chowder, according to Rene Verdon, who was White House chef for Kennedy and, later, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president, became commander-in-chief after JFK’s death — and Johnson’s proclivity for vegetables was detailed in “The White House Family Cookbook,” first published in 1987.
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Henry Haller, the longest-serving presidential chef at the White House, wrote the book and revealed some of Johnson’s favorite foods, including the okra he ate from his Texas ranch and how he enjoyed spinach, often in a light soufflé.
Johnson also routinely ate bacon in bed with his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and wanted guests to be served barbecue ribs at a party he held on the White House lawn after announcing he would not seek reelection in 1968, Haller wrote.
William Howard Taft, the nation’s 27th president from 1909-1913, enjoyed steak in the morning, afternoon and evening, according to former White House chief housekeeper Elizabeth Jaffray.
Taft would eat a 12-ounce steak for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day, Jaffray wrote in her book “Secrets of the White House.”
But he never paired his steak with eggs, the book said.
“President Taft liked every sort of food with the single exception of eggs,” Jaffray wrote.
Eventually, the portly Taft ordered a reduction in steak sizes – from 12 ounces to 6, Jaffray claimed.
Former President Abraham Lincoln enjoyed corned beef and cornbread, but first lady Mary Todd Lincoln said her husband’s favorite dish was chicken fricassee.
Not only that, but Lincoln also loved to cook, according to Rae Katherine Eighmey, who wrote the book “Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen: A Culinary View of Lincoln’s Life and Times.”
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The book explores ledgers from Lincoln’s grocery bills before his presidency in Illinois and how Lincoln turned a backyard grill into a cast-iron stove.
