According to this newswire item, during a recent visit to France, President Obama's meal was tested by a food-taster. It may seem like a story out of The Onion, but it's actually from AFP, a French news agency that dates back to 1835 and isn't known for pranks.
The Secret Service will neither confirm or deny the existence of a food-taster position, so it's hard to know much about the ins and outs of such a job. But we can at least draw some inferences from descriptions of royal food-tasters of the past. According to a whimsical website dedicated to "The Worst Jobs in History," an advertisement for the position might read like this:
"Do you have a taste for rich food and enjoy playing culinary roulette? In these troubled times, a position has arisen in the royal house to be her majesty's official food taster. You never know when some wretched rascal is going to have a pop at the queen and slip something nasty into a dainty dish, so your job is to taste everything before it crosses the royal lips.
"A sip of soup here, a smidgen of pie there, there's no end to the delights that await your taste buds. Of course, you won't actually get to eat any complete dishes, and there's always the chance that you'll crash to the floor clutching you throat as, with your last gasps, you slip off this mortal coil. But the money is fantastic and better than that – you'll be protecting the queen!"
And it's still better than the position known as "Ye Royal Whipping Boy." As Whipping Boy, it was your job to be punished in the place of the Prince. The good news is that you lived; the bad news is that you were never able to sit comfortably. All things considered, given my choice between being spanked and being dead...well, spanking is something you can develop a taste for. Which is more than I can say for being dead.
– Merrill Shindler