[chongli]

President will just never eat as far as the public knows

If the president never eats in public, how do we know they’re not a robot? This was a major plot point in the Asimov short story Evidence. The character went to extreme lengths to avoid being seen eating (and turned out to be a robot in the end).

[Mountain_Skies]

Baby Alive has been able to eat since the early 1970s. Pretty sure robopresident could find a place to internally store consumed food until returning to its maintenance pod.

[yorwba]

Robots have been able to fake eating since de Vaucanson's mechanical duck in 1739: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck

[wutbrodo]

In the story above, the candidate is capable of eating (and does so in front of one of the roboticist main characters). She points out, as you do, that it would be trivial to store food internally for later disposal

[orf]

You’re assuming that robots otherwise indistinguishable from humans couldn’t manage to develop any system to temporarily ingest food or liquid?

How do you know anyone isn’t a robot who can fake eat?

[chongli]

How do you know anyone isn’t a robot who can fake eat?

This is the premise of the short story. The robot politician pretends to eat in order to trick his opponents who are trying to out him as a robot by proving he can’t eat.

Spoilers: they then try to trick the robot into violating the three laws of robotics. He ends up tricking his opponents by having another robot attack him, letting him freely defend himself when he otherwise wouldn’t be able to (since robots can’t harm humans).

It’s a fantastic story. Well worth the read. My description doesn’t do it justice.