What Richard Nixon's final meal in the White House as president tells us about food culture and legacy

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US President Joe Biden has often been photographed enjoying a vanilla ice cream cone, former president Ronald Reagan liked jelly beans and John F Kennedy loved clam chowder. As president-elect Donald Trump's inauguration approaches, Mr Biden will soon have his last meal in the White House.

Although he did not realise it at the time, in August 1974, embattled president Richard Nixon, right before he officially resigned amid the Watergate scandal, had a last White House meal that would be photographed, with the image saved in the US National Archives.

That meal consisted of a blob of cottage cheese surrounded by pineapple, served on a plate with the presidential seal, accompanied by a glass of milk, all sitting on a silver tray.

Aside from being a relatively unassuming and anticlimactic meal, the choice of cottage cheese and pineapple stands out for being unconventional and, by today's standards, strange.

Yet according to files and correspondence collected by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, he had an affinity for cottage cheese with fruit, requesting it from White House staffers on several occasions, and sometimes went as far as requesting that the cottage cheese be accompanied by ketchup instead of fruit.

“Let me have a little half of cottage cheese and pineapple there, if you don't mind,” Mr Nixon could be heard saying on the now infamous White House recording system as he spoke with a White House waiter.

“Certainly will,” the waiter responded.

One of Mr Nixon's former aides, Alexander Butterfield, who later revealed the White House recording system to investigators, reflected on his preference for cottage cheese during a 2008 interview at a Nixon Presidential Library event.

“The president took a nap every day, without fail, which was good. He could lie down and close his eyes and go to sleep after a light, small curd cottage cheese lunch,” Mr Butterfield recalled.

Robert Thompson, a professor of pop-culture, television, radio and film at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, said that one of President Nixon's final choices for a White House meal speaks to the decades that preceded his resignation.

“The plating of the cottage cheese, in the mid-1970s, it already had that sense of already being old fashioned,” Prof Thompson said.

“We think of the pineapple ring and the cottage cheese as more of a 1950s and 1960s-style thing.”

He added that the meal choice, however, in the months and years that followed Mr Nixon's White House departure, helped reinforce his milquetoast image.

“It is an almost aggressively uninteresting meal,” he said. “By nobody's standards would it be considered in any way elegant or interesting.”

Prof Thompson speculated that it would not be a stretch to think of the cottage cheese and pineapple as a sign of Watergate scandal shame or penance.

“This wasn't imposed by others – he ordered it, it is almost a self-imposed punishment. He's having in some ways, a last communion and he's having it with cottage cheese on a pineapple slice, with a glass of milk.”

While there is some speculation that Mr Nixon's last White House meal was actually corned beef hash, there is no photo that has been documented as a last meal in the national archives.

Although somewhat unusual by today's culinary standards, especially those of the White House, Mr Nixon's penchant for cottage cheese was a sign of the times in which he grew up.

Today, consumers in the US have a wide variety of protein choices ranging from Greek yoghurt to quinoa, and sales data certainly backs that up.

But for the most part, over the last few decades, cottage cheese has fallen off the radar.

According to Google's Ngram search tool, references to cottage cheese in US literature peaked in the mid-1950s and 1960s.

There was a bit of a resurgence in the 1970s, but for the most part, it has been in steady decline since.

Yet the data definitely shows Mr Nixon's culinary choice was in line with his age, and why, looking back, the choice of cottage cheese seems odd.

Some media reports, however, do show signs of hope for cottage cheese, with some publications noting that Gen Z has rediscovered the culinary curdled milk product on TikTok, where it has more than 140 million mentions.

Despite its rising TikTok fame, Mr Biden is unlikely to make it his choice for a last meal. Perhaps it will be vanilla ice cream.