The All-Time Favorite Snacks Of 13 US Presidents

Just as presidents have their favorite breakfast foods or desserts, they also have their favorite snacks for those times when they just want a quick nibble or to satisfy a sweet tooth. Of course, technically, anything can be a snack. It's just food eaten outside of regular meal times. You can snack on leftovers from last night's dinner, after all. For this list, we've tried to look for those foods that don't need a lot of preparation and that aren't usually eaten as traditional meals. Someone who regularly eats ice cream after dinner, for example, is eating dessert and not a snack. But someone who randomly grabs some ice cream as they go about their day is treating it like a snack. 

One thing that's interesting about snacks is that they really show how the country's diet has changed over time. You can see ultra-processed foods creep into the list of presidential snacks as time goes on, just as those foods have made their way into the average American diet. Not all of the later presidents eat only ultra-processed, obviously, but you'll gradually see the introduction of more foods that you can't whip up in a home kitchen. So, let's see what else we were able to find about the all-time favorite snacks of 13 U.S. presidents.

George Washington was known to prefer simpler foods, and his love of nuts and cherries reflected that preference. Hazelnuts, walnuts, or hickory nuts would do when he craved a snack. Cherries, of course, are a classic Washington food. The story about him chopping down a cherry tree and not being able to lie to his father about it is likely not true, although as some point out, his family never contradicted it. But we do know that he had plenty of cherry trees planted at Mount Vernon, and an archaeological dig in 2024 found dozens of bottles of preserved fruit in the cellar, including lots of cherries.

Pineapples were a slightly different story. They're easy to get now, but back in the 1700s, they were a luxury food that you could rent to display at fancy dinners. Washington first got to try pineapples when he visited the island of Barbados when he was younger. He wrote in a diary about how pleased he was with so many of the interesting tropical fruits, but he singled out pineapples specifically as being the one he liked most. Washington would repeatedly ask ship captains who were bringing food from Washington's Mount Vernon farm to the West Indies to return with some pineapples. The family also received several pineapples as gifts when Martha Washington was ill during the Revolutionary War.

Apples were Abraham Lincoln's favorite snack as well as his favorite food. From plain apples to apple pan dowdy, apples were one of the foods that Lincoln would eat in abundance. Even when he didn't have much of an appetite, he'd still make room for apples. He was also rumored to love corn cakes, supposedly eating those as fast as anyone could cook them, but you'll find more mentions of apples when you look up the foods he truly enjoyed eating.

Lincoln didn't have apple orchards, unlike Washington and his cherry trees. However, he still ended up with an apple nicknamed after him. The Red Astrachan apple is a Russian cultivar that made its way through Sweden and Western Europe to the U.S. in 1835. It's a sweet, early-season apple that was once extremely popular throughout the eastern and southern U.S., and its ability to grow well in Illinois has earned it the nickname of "Abe Lincoln."

Teddy Roosevelt's favorite snack wasn't exactly plain — it did require baking — but compared to the lists of ingredients you see in some cookies nowadays, it was still pretty simple. Roosevelt liked to grab a few Sagamore Hill sand tarts to munch on to soothe a sweet tooth. Admittedly, that sounds like it gets into dessert territory instead of being just a snack, and he did apparently have these as a follow-up to dinner, to dunk in coffee. But Roosevelt's love for these was so well known (as was his love for sweets overall) that it's a safe bet that he snacked on them, too.

Sand tarts are like shortbread or sugar cookies, depending on the recipe, and their name nowadays comes from their texture. Earlier legends about the name refer to a tradition of serving the cookies in heart shapes, or "sand hearts." Some recipes produce moderately thick cookies that have a sandy or crumbly texture when you bite into them, while others produce crisp, thin cookies that still break apart easily and have a "sandy" topping like cinnamon. The particular recipe that Roosevelt liked was named after his New York estate.

William Howard Taft's love of salted almonds was legendary. He could supposedly pack away a pound of almonds at a time — that is a lot of calories — and if you look at the menus for stops during his travels or during his stay at the White House, you're going to find salted almonds listed at just about every opportunity. Some say that any type of almond was his favorite, and you will find mentions of "deviled almonds" alongside salted almonds. But, for Taft, salted almonds reigned supreme.

Taft was known for his girth, even becoming the subject of a myth that he once got stuck in a White House bathtub. Cartoonists mocked his weight, too. A former college heavyweight wrestler who stood 6 feet 2 inches, Taft topped 354 pounds at his heaviest, around the time of his inauguration. His battle with his weight has also received a lot of attention, even in recent years, as researchers looked at his letters that described his attempt at what we would now call a low-carb, low-fat diet before he took office. That diet did let him drop several pounds over a few months, but in his letters to his brother, he noted that he was always hungry as he tried to maintain the loss. 

You'll find a good number of random sources repeating that grilled cheese was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's favorite food, sandwich, and snack. And it's true that one of his favorite sandwiches was a toasted cheese, which is an older name for a grilled cheese. But cookbooks that looked at presidential diets and what the chefs in the White House regularly prepared mention cheese itself as the family's main snack and even as their favorite dessert, along with fruit.

One book, "The Presidential Cookbook: Feeding the Roosevelts and Their Guests," was written by the Roosevelts' longtime housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt. She noted that cheese "was a daily standby" but that she actually didn't have many recipes that used cheese. It's probably safe to assume then that the Roosevelts were eating plenty of plain cheese, rather than using it as an ingredient only. This actually isn't surprising. Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a foodie, and she was also very aware of how extravagant presidential meals might not land well with a country suffering from the Great Depression and World War II. As a result, she, Nesbitt, and home economists designed recipes that people on a budget could make easily. Nesbitt, unfortunately, didn't have a great reputation as a cook, and people were more aghast than appreciative of the recipes. The Roosevelt administration developed a reputation for serving unpalatable food.

With Lyndon B. Johnson, we finally enter the modern era of off-the-store-shelf snacks. President Johnson had two favorite snacks, and one was actually homemade. The first was a small version of baking powder biscuits made from Lady Bird Johnson's own recipe and stuffed with deer meat sausage. The sausage itself was homemade, too, and was half deer and half hog, with lots of black and red pepper, baked at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The recipe made a 200-pound batch, and Johnson would often send some as a Christmas gift.

As for that commercially produced snack, he liked Fiddle-Faddle, that mix of caramel or toffee, popcorn, and peanuts in a box. In fact, Fiddle-Faddle would appear in bowls at White House receptions, where LBJ would forget any diet menu he was supposed to follow and continually nibble on the delicious snack, apparently to Lady Bird Johnson's dismay.

Jimmy Carter's favorites were simple, with peanuts, cheese, and buttered Saltine crackers all having their moments in the presidential snack spotlight. The Carters were such fans of dairy products, including cheese, that even the New York Times took notice and described to the country just how much President Carter loved cheese. Carter was allergic to Swiss cheese but not other types. His favorite, according to the Times, was "good old hard American "rat‐trap," or store cheese."

Peanuts were a constant snack as well, although the family apparently wasn't eating them in excess. Reports stated that they ate a normal amount but were happy to promote the legumes, given the family's ties to the peanut industry. Salted and deep-fried peanuts were a particular favorite. Carter also liked butter on Saltine crackers, often having some before dinner.

Despite the abundance of deep-fried nuts, cheese, and butter in the White House, the overall diets of the Carters were generally healthy, at least according to today's standards. Carter was the first president to publicly connect diet and disease. The Carters followed recommendations set out in a 1977 Senate report that said Americans should reduce fats, salt, food additives, and sugar, and increase fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain products. Believe it or not, the American Medical Association pushed back against that report at the time, stating that there was no established connection between diet and disease (via The Washington Post).

Ronald Reagan's love for Jelly Belly brand jelly beans became very well-known when he was on the 1980 campaign trail. When he ran for president, so many people wanted to buy the candies that the Herman Goelitz Candy company repeatedly sold out, and you couldn't find the candies anywhere. Sales doubled within one year, and orders were backlogged despite the company doubling production and increasing warehouse space.

Reagan used to be a pipe smoker, but wanted to stop when he ran for governor of California. He turned to food, nibbling on Goelitz Mini Jelly Beans. He ate them so consistently that the company started sending shipments of the candy to him, and in 1976, his package included a new product from the Goelitz company: Jelly Belly jelly beans. Reagan eventually switched over to eating only the Jelly Belly candy, even arranging for the company to provide red, white, and blue Jelly Belly candies at his presidential inauguration.

Reagan's consumption of the candies continued throughout his presidency, where he'd offer the jelly beans to guests and give them as diplomatic gifts. (Remember, Jelly Belly was still fairly unusual at this point; they would have been a unique American gift.) His favorite flavor, out of the many that the Goelitz company produced? Licorice.

George H.W. Bush's favorite snack is the subject of a little debate. He was well-known for eating pork rinds, and there's no doubt that he really did like them; even the George and Barbara Bush Foundation has referred to rinds being his favorite snack. He would douse the rinds in Tabasco sauce, and his love for the snack even showed up at the 1988 Republican National Convention, where his campaign arranged to provide bags of pork rinds with a packet of Tabasco sauce to delegates and alternates. The packages were called "Grand Old Porkrinds" (for the Grand Old Party, get it?). 13,000 bags were created, with a warning that they weren't for wimps. That was a play on the "wimp" reputation that some were trying to pin on Bush. But close friends claimed he really loved popcorn and that he provided a lot of popcorn for movie showings at the White House theater. 

George W. Bush, unlike his father, didn't list pork rinds or popcorn as favorites. He preferred pretzels — and yes, we'll get to the infamous pretzel incident in a moment — and apparently, deviled eggs. That last one comes from First Lady Laura Bush, who, according to Walter Scheib and Andrew Friedman in their book, "White House Chef," said that deviled eggs were a favorite snack on the weekends. The recipe combines mayonnaise, butter, salt, Dijon mustard, and, true to their Texas roots, habanero sauce.

About those pretzels: Yes, they were — and are — a favorite of his, despite his almost choking on one in January 2002 while watching a football game on TV. He actually lost consciousness at one point, falling off the couch, but he made light of the situation afterward, saying that his mother had always warned him to chew his pretzels. The pretzels were from Hammond's, which had long provided the snack to the White House.

Barack Obama's snacks were basic for the most part, although according to one source, he did have a preference for protein bars, too. Obama was notorious for snacking on almonds, mainly because of a joke that spread throughout the press. Rumors said that he ate exactly seven almonds every night, but he attributed this to a joke about his disciplined habits made by First Lady Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass that was repeated to the New York Times.

Planter's Trail Mix is also sometimes listed as an Obama favorite, and pistachios often get a mention along with those almonds, too. And finally, he's been reported as snacking on MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars. Given that Obama's days would often start with a rigorous weight-training workout, it's not surprising that his snacks would focus so much on protein.

With Joe Biden, we switch from foods like eggs and nuts back to the candy and sweet side of snacking. Do you remember back at the beginning of this article when we mentioned someone snacking on ice cream? That's Joe Biden. His consumption of ice cream while in office was so common that Sky News labeled him as a "known ice cream fiend," while other stations would frequently report on how he'd always stop for ice cream when traveling. He was known to finish off cartons of chocolate chip ice cream, his favorite, when First Lady Jill Biden wasn't around.

Biden was also open about snacking on Fig Newtons, claiming in one interview that they were easy for him to sneak because they were so small. Chocolate chip cookies were another favorite snack, and Biden had those plus saltwater taffy available in the outer Oval Office. As tasty as those sound, his choices were the source of disagreement between him and First Lady Jill Biden, who would try to get him to eat more fruits, vegetables, fish, and similar foods.

Donald Trump's snack consumption is off the charts — and that's according to Trump himself. In an interview with People magazine in 2015, Trump admitted that the food he ate on the campaign trail was just snacks due to the busy nature of the trips. He even admitted it wasn't the healthiest choice, but said he still dropped 15 pounds while campaigning.

Biden and Trump may not have much in common, but they do share this: Cookies remain part of the White House presidential snack stash. Trump apparently keeps many Oreo packages around and munches on them frequently, as well as having Vienna Fingers and pretzels available on his private plane. He is a known fan of Doritos, and Lay's potato chips are always available at the White House. He's also a fan of See's Candies, but whether he merely likes them or actually snacks on them is unknown.