The Eccentric Eating Habits Of Some Influential Figures

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

Mankind has always had an intimate relationship with food. So it is not surprising that some of the most remarkable influential figures in history they have often had strange ideas about how and what to eat.

Zuckerberg eats only what he kills

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is known for tackling long-standing challenges to cultivation, such as wearing a tie every day in 2009 and learning Chinese every day in 2010. However, it came as a shock when in 2011 announced The only meat I eat is from animals I have killed. After announcing his decision on his personal page, he wrote: I just killed a pig and a goat, which provoked different reactions from his followers.

According to an email Zuckerberg sent to Fortune magazine: I started thinking about this last year when I had roast pork at home. One group of people told me that although they like to eat pork, they really don't want to think about the fact that the pig was alive. That seemed irresponsible to me. I don't have a problem with something that people choose to eat, but I think they should take responsibility and be grateful for what they eat, instead of trying to ignore where it comes from.

Beethoven's soup

Ludwig van Beethoven is known for many things, but few know how seriously he took his soup. According to a famous composer, only a housewife or a cook with a pure heart can prepare pure soup. Beethoven did not tolerate any opposition, especially from his longtime secretary Anton Schindler. If Beethoven thought the soup was bad and Schindler disagreed, Beethoven sent him an insulting remark: I don't appreciate your judgment of the soup, at least it's bad.

One of Beethoven's favorite dishes was a loaf of bread, which he ate every Thursday with 10 large eggs to be mixed into the soup. He examined the eggs, holding them in the light. Woe to the housekeeper if they weren't completely fresh. She was always ready to run away, as Beethoven's custom was to punish her with eggs.

Gerald Ford's strange lunch

This is a frequently quoted piece of curious fact that President Richard Nixon's daily lunch is cottage cheese covered in ketchup. After he was elected president, an article in Washington mocked that elegant White House dinners were replaced by cottage cheese and ketchup.

Less well known is that President Gerald Ford is also fond of the strange lunch he eats every day while reading or working. An Air Force official reveals in the book Inside the White House: President Ford is eating A1 sauce and ketchup with cottage cheese. We always had a vegetable garnish with spring onions, celery sticks, radishes. We have always served ketchup and A1 sauce with them.

The diet of Nicholas Cage

Nicholas Cage is known for his career. Sure, there are enough weird things to say about him, but his diet can beat them. He consumes only animals that he considers to mate in a "dignified manner."

Explaining the reason for his choice, Cage says: In fact, I choose the way I eat according to the way the animals mate. I prefer fish and birds. But pigs not so much. So I do not eat pork. I eat fish and birds.

And while pork is not worthy of his taste, the actor has eaten quite a few strange things in the name of art. In 1988, the movie Vampire's Kiss forced Cage to eat a live cockroach, which turned out to be a disgusting task: Not every fiber in my body wanted to do it, Cage told the Telegraph. "But I did it anyway."

Weeds of Henry Ford

Henry Ford was picky about his food - he usually had nuts or raisins in his pocket. In his youth he was not particularly interested in food. This changed when he began to perceive his body as a machine and his stomach as a cauldron that he needed to provide the right fuel.

The act of feeding is more practical than sensual, and Ford is experimenting with wild weeds as a food source. His food experiments caused a great deal of suffering to his business partners. Although Ford received a salary of almost $ 1 million a year, he preferred a diet of "roadside greens," which were essentially edible weeds. According to biographer Sidney Olson: He ate something like a dish of stewed burdock, followed by a soy bread sandwich full of milk roots.

The weeds that Ford collected were often lightly boiled or stewed and then used in salads or sandwiches. However, the diet seems to pay off because Henry Ford was rarely ill and lived to be 83 years old.

Gay chicken of Evo Morales

Bolivian President Evo Morales sparked controversy in 2001 when he said that eating chicken injected with hormones was a major cause of homosexuality. At the World Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth's rights in Cochabamba, he impressed the progressive public with his views. If it's a chicken, it's inflated with female hormones, he says. "And when men eat that chicken, they deviate from being men."

It also links bird consumption to male pattern baldness. Within hours, the impact of his comments spread to the international media.

The Morales government reacted quickly. In a public statement, the Foreign Ministry explained that Morales was talking about sexuality. Rather, he says, eating chicken, which has hormones, changes our bodies. This view has been confirmed by scientists and even the European Union has banned the use of certain hormones in food.

Many homosexual rights activists were not convinced. The president of the Argentine homosexual community, Cesar Chigliti, says: It is absurd to think that eating chicken containing hormones can change a person's sexual orientation. Following these considerations, if we put male hormones in a chicken and it is eaten by a homosexual, will he become heterosexual?

Morales also has a long-standing antipathy to unhealthy American food, complaining to the United Nations in 2013 that fast food in the West is a great harm to humanity. He accuses fast food companies of causing cancer and is trying to revive quinoa as an alternative and healthy food.

Howard Hughes' food fetishes

Film mogul, industrialist and businessman Howard Hughes has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which has affected his eating habits. He kept to some bizarre food preparations, such as having his servants wrap the handles of the utensils in paper. They were then sealed with cellophane and wrapped in a second piece of paper. He only touched the covered handles because he was afraid of germs.

His servants also had to open the boxes of food in a certain way. First, the servant will hold the box under warm running water. He or she then uses a brush and special soaps to remove the label. The box is then soaked to remove all dust and germs. Then the bottom is cleaned in the same way. All dents in the box should also be cleaned with soap and rinsed. During the trial, the servant was not allowed to drop the can.

Hughes suffered from constipation because he refused to eat leafy vegetables. He enjoyed an orderly menu, which he changed every few months. For example, if you eat peas, they should be the same size. If any of the peas were too large, Hughes would send them back to the kitchen to be replaced. He almost always ate alone. According to his chef, Hughes didn't even eat with his wife on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

When he became a prisoner, however, in his later years, he ate almost exclusively chocolate bars and milk. Howard Hughes isolates himself in a studio near his home, surrounded by empty bottles and containers, which he uses to relieve himself when nature calls. This solitary lifestyle affects his health. When he finally died, people compared the condition of his body to that of a Japanese prisoner.

Hitler's vegetarianism

Many meat lovers like to tell their vegetarian friends that Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, and vegetarians often disagree. The truth is more nuanced. Until the early 1930s, Hitler showed a penchant for certain meat products, especially dumplings and sausages. He is said to have joined Wagner's theory that the thirst for flesh and blood can never be quenched and fills his victims with fierce madness, not courage.

However, he did not completely oppose the consumption of meat until his niece and possible mistress Geli Raubal committed suicide in 1931. Then he refused to eat ham for breakfast - It's like eating a corpse! he says.

Hitler also turned away from meat because he believed it caused chronic constipation and flatulence. He ate his vegetables raw or in porridge. Some of his favorite foods were oatmeal with linseed oil, cauliflower, cottage cheese, boiled apples, artichokes and asparagus in white sauce.

However, a high-fiber diet had the exact opposite effect on him. After Hitler ate a particularly large plate of vegetables, his doctor, Theo Morel, once wrote in his diary that Hitler had constipation and colossal gas on a scale I had rarely seen before.

Of course, this is not only due to his vegetarian diet, but also because of the absurd regimen of drugs and treatments administered by his doctor, which includes an enema with chamomile and a heavy dose of supplements. Some of these supplements are vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose, opiates and poisonous strychnine tablets.

Mussolini's milk addiction

Benito Mussolini also had digestive problems strange eating habits, such as refusing to eat at banquets. He believed that eating was an activity to which one should devote all one's attention and that eating in the presence of other people would make one capable of eating wrong.

In 1925, he vomited blood at his home in Rome and was forced to postpone his public appearances for a few weeks. There were rumors that Mussolini might need to be replaced as leader of the National Fascist Party. Doctors diagnosed him with a stomach ulcer and recommended a drastic change in diet after he refused surgery. His new diet consisted mainly of fruit and up to 3 liters of milk every day. This obviously did not help him, because in 1929 he got another ulcer.

After the Allies invaded Italy and the Nazis withdrew to a German satellite state called the Republic of Salo, Mussolini sought the help of a doctor named Dr. Zacharias. Shocked by the patient's appearance, the doctor says: I found myself in front of a ruined man, who apparently has one threshold in the grave. Mussolini suffered from ulcers, anemia, constipation, insomnia and low blood pressure. His skin was dry and inelastic, and his abdomen around his liver was swollen.

Zacharias blamed the intake of so much milk for this and reduced it to 0.25 liters every day for a week. The doctor begins to treat Mussolini with small doses of vitamins and hormones, which have an immediate positive effect. After his liver returned to normal, Mussolini remarked: I must tell you that I feel liberated. I no longer feel pain in my stomach and I am not afraid of the night.

The doctor insists that Mussolini eat light vegetables such as carrots and potatoes and drink tea without milk. Although Mussolini prefers vegetarianism, the doctor insists that his patient eat small amounts of boiled chicken and fish. Along with injecting vitamins B and C, the new diet increased his red blood cell count and improved his health. Although Mussolini refused to eat while the Italian people were starving, Zacharias later boasted that he had restored Mussolini's health.

Gastronomy of Kim Jong Il

Due to the testimony of Kim Jong Il's former personal chef, Kenji Fujimoto, we know a lot about eating habits of the former North Korean tyrant. While much of the country is starving, Kim indulges in expensive and complex foods and drinks. There is a wine cellar with over 10,000 bottles and a library with thousands of cookbooks.

Kim is committed to getting the best food and often sends Fujimoto on foreign trips to pick up delicacies: Iran and Uzbekistan for caviar, France for cognac, Denmark for pork, western China for grapes, Thailand for papaya and mango, and Beijing for McDonald's. Former North Korean diplomats also sent exotic delicacies, such as camel legs, from the countries in which they were housed.

Kim set up an institute of leading doctors and scientists to create a diet that would increase his longevity. This is a cause for concern, as the 158-centimeter dictatorial eating habits have led him to weigh almost 90 kilograms. Doctors began checking each grain of his rice by hand to make sure it was perfectly shaped, with no cracks or chips. Kim insists that the rice be prepared on wood using trees cut from Mount Paektu, the legendary mountain on the border with China.

Fujimoto also reveals the dictator's love of sushi. When Fujimoto tries to leave North Korea (after being banned from traveling abroad), he does so with a cunning trick. He shows the dish "Dear Leader" in the new episode of the cooking show Iron Chef, in which the secret ingredient is sea urchin or uni.

He mentions that the best place to get this ingredient is from Rishiri Island off the coast of Hokkaido. Kim sends his chef there, who manages to escape from his guides at a fish market in Tokyo and disappears into the crowd. Fujimoto did not return to North Korea until Kim Jong Il's death.