Henry Ford was a brilliant businessman who helped revolutionized the automotive industry. He was also an eccentric weirdo and a fascist who loved Hitler, hated his own child, and busted unions. Despite carrying a lifetime of anger and hatred, Ford was an incredibly healthy person who lived to be 83 when living to 83 was a pretty huge accomplishment. According to Sidney Olson’s biography Young Henry Ford he was “always a birdseed-type eater, who tries to please the hostess by making a brave show of cutlass work with the knife and fork, and yet somehow only slightly disturbs the food on the plate.” Even deep into his career turning automobiles into money, Ford spent as little as possible on food, preferring to make his lunches from what he called “roadside greens,” assorted weeds he would pile into a salad, boil into a stew, or would create “weed spread” to put on bread for a sandwich. It’s no wonder his neighbors called him “Crazy Henry.”
Henry Ford became good friends with George Washington Carver across the 1930s, and the two shared a passion for “chemurgy” studying the use of agricultural products to further industry. The two bonded further over meals of wild-grown vegetation, including wild bergamot, narrow-leaf plantain, purslane, pigweed, milkweed, dandelion, lamb’s quarters, and wild radish, among others.
Food is fuel
In his later years Henry Ford began to view his stomach as a boiler, and filling it with food was merely a means to provide him the energy he needed to get through a day. A staunch vegetarian, Ford rarely cared about flavor or enjoyment of a meal, simply that it was organic mass in his proverbial gas tank for him to burn. His favorite meals were apparently stewed burdock and soybean bread with milkweed and mustard. I’m not sure even the crunchiest of granola hippies would commit to such a diet today. Ford claims his eating habits afforded him the ability to live as old as he did with “no more than a few hours of illness all his life.”
Maybe it was Ford’s preference for soy milk and so-called roadside greens that kept him alive all those years, or maybe it was that he was a very wealthy man who could afford proper medical care, lived in a nice big house, and spent every winter living in the warmth of South Florida. We may never know the real answer.
