What Benjamin Franklin Ate in a Day — Meal by Meal

What Benjamin Franklin Ate in a Day — Meal by Meal On a Sunday morning in October 1723, a tired, dirty seventeen year old boy stepped off a boat at the Market Street wharf in Philadelphia. He had run away from his family in Boston. He had almost no money. And he was starving. So he walked into a bakery and asked for three pennies' worth of bread. The baker handed him three great puffy rolls, far more than he expected. He had no pockets big enough. So he walked up Market Street with a roll under each arm, eating the third one as he went. A young woman standing in the doorway of her father's house watched him go by. She thought he made, in his own later words, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance. Her name was Deborah Read. Seven years later, she became his wife. And the boy with the bread rolls was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin became a printer, a writer, a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. And he wrote about food more than almost anyone of his time. What he ate, what he refused to eat, what he drank, what he missed when he was far from home, and what he believed food did to a man's mind. So today we are walking through one day of Benjamin Franklin's life, meal by meal. From the strange way he started every morning, to the breakfast he ate with no tea, to the bean curd he wrote about before almost anyone in America, to a wine cellar in Paris with more than a thousand bottles in it. And at the end, the most famous Benjamin Franklin quote about drinking, and why he never actually said it. Hit subscribe if you want to see how the Founding Fathers really ate. Here is what Benjamin Franklin ate in a day, meal by meal.