A closely kept FDA secret was revealed in media coverage of the inauguration

The FDA is more of an enigma than we ever imagined.

In the Wall St. Journal coverage of the inauguration ceremonies, the paper inadvertently revealed a closely kept FDA secret.

Somewhere among the ranks of FDA officials, there’s a guy whose job description reads… “cake escort.”

Layer cakes. Cheese cakes. Devil’s food. Red velvet. He’s seen them all.

He made an appearance two times during the inauguration.

On inauguration day, he escorted a massive nine-tier cake from Charm City Cakes in Baltimore to the site of the Commander-in-Chief’s Ball. (Duff and the other Charm City designers played this one pretty straight. Their cake featured the presidential seal with emblems of each military branch. And plenty of stars and stripes, of course.)

But the cake escort’s grueling schedule didn’t end there.

The next day, he escorted a three-foot-high cheesecake from Chicago to Washington. The destination was a presidential after-party for campaign and inauguration volunteers.

The WSJ report didn’t spell it out. But we can read between the lines. Apparently, anytime a cake is delivered to a presidential function, the FDA cake escort rides shotgun.

And you have to wonder… Is he also an official taster? Does he take a bite of each cake to make sure it hasn’t been poisoned?

Does he put his life on the line every time he’s called on to escort a cake?

We’ll probably never know. But we do know this… In the massive bureaucracy of the U.S. government, he’s the one guy who can literally say, “My job? It’s cake.”

Sources:
A Peek Into the Year’s Big Party” The Wall St. Journal, 1/22/13, online.wsj.com

online.wsj.com