Does the president have an official food taster to make sure he won get poisoned?
Cecil replies: The golden age of political poisoning (pace the estate of Alexander Litvinenko) has largely come and gone. As various authors on the topic have pointed out, it made for an ideal assassination method in, say, Renaissance Italy: when forensic medicine was nonexistent and food prep (even for the privileged) was unsanitary, it was pretty hard to tell what was murder and what was simply bad shellfish. Back then food tasters were defense against inadvertent poisoning as much as the deliberate kind. Today’s heads of state could be forgiven, though, for thinking poisoning might still be a risk. We know Saddam Hussein, for one, had people on the payroll to sample his chow. (His notorious son Uday apparently incurred his wrath by having a favorite food taster killed.) And arguably Viktor Yushchenko could have used some help during his run for the Ukrainian presidency in 2004; someone slipped him enough dioxin to threaten his life and disfigure him severely. Figureheads seem to hav
Related Questions
- President Kagame, how can you be sure that in rounding up the ex-FAR and Interahamwe, you won also be rounding up people who had nothing to do with the genocide in Rwanda in 1994?
- Does the president have an official food taster to make sure he won get poisoned?
- What is the official name of President Obamas stimulus package?
