Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington were two of the Jazz Age's greatest eaters. Jet magazine described the elderly trumpeter, as “quite a scarfer (eater)” in a feature speculating about the nature of his latest diet secret in 1968; and not even death spared Duke Ellington from being commemorated as “a prolific diner” by a posthumous profile in the New Statesman upon the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday. Both musicians described their meals fondly in the context of their published life writing. Armstrong's food and laxative references function as leitmotifs in the volumes that created the genre of the jazz autobiography with the publication of his ghostwritten Swing That Music (1936) and Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1956). Ellington followed suit in his 1973 autobiography, Music is My Mistress, but he confined his musings on the subject to just one chapter. Born into poverty and deprivation, both musicians rose out of their humble circumstances due to their immense talent, dedicated work ethic, and a series of lucky breaks. Despite these hardships or, perhaps, because of them, Armstrong and Ellington carried a torch for their respective mothers’ cooking and this appreciation for comfort food eventually manifested itself physically in the form of obesity, something each man experienced throughout adulthood. Though their approach to public disclosure differed significantly, both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington applied the same skillset they had relied upon for their musical success—creativity and improvisation—to tackle the most serious threat to their health and public image: obesity. Neither Ellington nor Armstrong was content to follow another's lead in terms of modifying their alimentary behavior and, thus, each devised idiosyncratic eating regimes during the 1950s and then shared these with the reading public. When they did, they found an eager audience.

Despite the Victory Gardens and food rationing that characterized domestic efforts to support the troops in the USA during the First and Second World Wars, and regardless of the bread lines, soup kitchens, and other nutritional deprivations that occurred due to Depression and the Dust Bowl, weight-loss regimes became enormously popular during the interwar period as Louise Foxcroft explains in Calories & Corsets: “By the 1930s, dieting was everywhere.”