Vladimir Putin is a pretty paranoid guy — so it's no wonder he has several food tasters
on his staff.
But how far will Putin go to ensure he's not poisoned?
Like, has he ever gone days without eating?
Keep watching to find out.
When Russian defector and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in 2006, it took nearly
a month before he died.
Obviously, state leaders like Putin aren't willing to wait weeks to see if they've been
served radioactive tea.
In 2014, the Independent reported on a London meeting of the elite Club des Chefs des Chefs,
where details leaked about the Russian president's "full-time food taster."
While these "Chefs des Chefs" all shared the privilege of preparing food for leaders the
world over, Putin's personal chef was not included among them, seeing as his cook is
part of his security detail.
The logic for Putin's choice is the same for U.S. presidents: If guards are making the
food, theoretically it must be safe to eat.
The Russian president besieging Ukraine has reportedly been known to ramp up security
around his meals after political controversies break.
In 2018, Putin allegedly hired "even more" taste testers after accusations that he poisoned
double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain.
Skripal, a spy for the Russians who flipped to work for U.K. intelligence, was exposed
to a deadly nerve agent in a Salisbury park, leading detectives to suspect that the attack
was a deliberate and targeted assassination attempt.
Not only were Skripal and his daughter afflicted, but passersby were hit, too.
In addition to fearing he may be poisioned through his food, Vladimir Putin is just as
concerned with other forms of potential assassinations.
The New York Post reported that Putin's bodyguards aren't just heavies with fancy guns, but a
specialized squad selected for particular attributes like multilingual skills, stamina,
and even not sweating in the heat.
These "Musketeers," as they're called, are reportedly equipped with bulletproof briefcases,
remote-detonation jammers — even "Kevlar umbrellas," according to state media.
What's more, these guards are swapped out at age 35 to bring in new staff who can secure
the life of the 69-year-old wartime leader.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Putin has also been known to take social distancing
to an extreme — keeping advisors at least 20 feet apart from him.
He even wore an entire hazmat suit and mask while visiting a Russian hospital with COVID-19
afflicted patients.
Vladimir Putin aside, food security is actually quite common among world leaders.
However, the concept of the poor medieval peasant in the king's court, sipping wine
and sampling meats to test for deadly poison, is largely outdated.
Though Putin's culinary staff may not attend the Club des Chefs des Chefs, executive chefs
for the president of the United States do a job similar to that of the Kremlin's cooks.
White House chefs oversee the preparation of every bit of food that the president might
eat, even if another cook is making it.
According to the Independent, President George W. Bush, for instance, would fly out ingredients
from home before dining with a foreign dignitary.
His successor, President Barack Obama, had a food tester accompany him in France.
And Michael Wolff writes in Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House that former president
Donald Trump preferred fast food due to a "longtime fear of being poisoned."
"I like it all.
All good stuff.
Great, great American food."
Given the long list of presidents who have faced assassination attempts, can you blame
them?
So how does someone get a job as a food tester?
Maybe check LinkedIn, as a start, though there's no guarantee that the ad is real, says Washingtonian.
But any genuine applicant for the position of food taster would also have to fulfill
other duties as assigned.
The more modern concept of having security-cleared culinary staff prepare food seemingly eliminates
the need for a dedicated food taster.
But Putin may prefer keeping a taster around for moral support rather than for any practical
purpose.
After all, even "traditional" methods of poisoning can take hours or days to kill someone.
Many common poisons simply don't kill fast enough to be detectable right before a meal.
Smithsonian Magazine, in conversation with Cambridge chemistry professor John Emsley,
found that taking high doses of strychnine and atropine can be deadly within a 24-hour
period, with arsenic causing vomiting "within a few hours" and death possibly "within a
day."
But of all the most popular poisons, only cyanide, said the magazine, can kill someone
before dinner's through.
Cyanide poisoning is a pretty dramatic affair, with victims experiencing dizziness, dilated
pupils, convulsions, and in some cases, seizures.
With only one kind of poison taking effect fast enough to notice before chowing down,
Smithsonian writer Ashley Luthern suspected that royals and elected leaders like Putin
likely consider food tasters "a placebo."
Luthern explained,
"The taster made the royal eater feel safer, but didn't really protect him or her."
If the Russian president and his American counterparts sound paranoid, they're not alone.
According to the Independent, Japan's royal family had an official sushi taster until
1989, and Saddam Hussein was known to keep a fleet of tasters on the payroll.
Hitler unsurprisingly was terrified that assassins were planning to spike his food near the end
of World War II, and employed a personal food taster to sample his meals each day.
Elsewhere, Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu was also known to use food tasters to ease
his paranoia of being taken out by his next meal.
Smithsonian Magazine wrote that the practice of tasting food to check meals for poison
is as old as the ancient world.
Historians know that a famous taster in ancient Rome was Halotus, who was the "official taster"
for Emperor Claudius.
While poisonings were rare, Halotus failed at least once in his job, as the emperor died
on his watch.
Apparently, getting a job as an imperial food taster could help a given Roman climb the
social ladder, and somehow letting the emperor get killed didn't stop Halotus from getting
a promotion later on.
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