Elvis Presley's Last Meal Was A Combination Of Sweet Treats

Elvis Presley's seemingly endless appetite has become nearly as legendary as his storied career as the King of Rock and Roll. He favored rich Southern comfort foods in large proportions, and all those calories eventually caught up to him. He was hospitalized multiple times towards the end of his life for hypertension and an enlarged colon, among other health issues, and when he died, he weighed nearly 350 pounds.

On August 16, 1977, the 42-year-old musician was at his Memphis, Tennessee mansion, Graceland, enjoying the last meal he'd ever have. It wasn't the infamous fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches that his cook Mary Jenkins Langston made for him using two sticks of butter to fry up three of them, or his other, lesser-known favorite sammy, the Fool's Gold Loaf, made from an entire loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, jar of jelly, and a pound of bacon. No, Elvis' last meal consisted of four scoops of vanilla ice cream and six chocolate chip cookies. Like Elvis, crooner Frank Sinatra also chose a childhood classic for his last meal: a grilled cheese sandwich. Even legends sometimes need comfort food, it seems.

Elvis Presley's tastes tended to run towards the down home, and included soul food — the important Southern cuisine created by Black Americans — such as collard greens and family-sized bowls of banana pudding. Though he was a very wealthy man, his tastes stayed true to his upbringing in rural Mississippi. Elvis could have had the absolute best of the best when it came to his final meal, but instead he had Sealtest ice cream and Chips Ahoy! cookies. Neither of these products would be categorized as gourmet.

Sealtest was a dairy owned by the National Dairy Products Corporation, the forerunner of Kraft, and was especially popular in the 1950s. Chips Ahoy is a Nabisco product that the company launched in 1963. On his final day on earth, Elvis, having already eaten a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs, told his cook he wanted "ice cream and cookies, but not as much as usual," according to "Their Last Suppers: Legends of History and Their Final Meals." Not long after downing his ice cream and cookies, along with a multitude of prescription pills, the King died of a heart attack in his bathroom.