If you feel like your food could use a boost to become a genius, try these tips at your own risk following the "foodsteps" of history's greatest geniuses, as compiled by NPR and Care2.com.
A lot of geniuses were picky eaters. Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, hated beans. He supposedly forbade his followers from eating them, or even touching them. His dislike of legumes may have led to his death. According to legend, when attackers ambushed him, he refused to escape by running through a bean field.
Some geniuses were vegetarians, including Leonardo da Vinci, Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw and the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Norbert Wiener.
Quite a few geniuses had quirky eating habits. Steve Jobs had some funny ideas about food, as he did about so many things. According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs, the Silicon Valley whiz kid subsisted mainly on dates, almonds - and lots of carrots. He supposedly ate so many carrots that "friends remember him, at times, having a sunset-orange hue," writes Isaacson.
Later, Jobs embarked on weeklong fasts, going about it "in my usual nutso way," he told Isaacson. "After a week, you start to feel fantastic. You get a ton of vitality from not having to digest all this food. Jobs wasn't alone in believing that the secret to a creative mind is a sparse diet. Aristophanes, the ancient Greek satirist, attributed the keen Athenian intellect to their low-calorie diet. Michelangelo was indifferent to food and ate "more out of necessity than pleasure," according to his apprentice and biographer Ascanio Condivi. While working on The Last Judgment, he wouldn't eat until the evening, when he was done a painting for the day.
There was Charles Darwin. He not only studied exotic animals, he also ate them. While studying at Cambridge University, he headed the Glutton Club, whose members met weekly to eat "strange flesh," including owls, hawks, and bittern. Later, aboard the Beagle, he sampled armadillos (which "taste and look like a duck"), iguanas and giant tortoises.
Clearly, food need not be appealing in order to inspire. Friedrich Schiller, the poet, and philosopher, always kept a carton of rotten apples under his desk when he wrote. He said the odor reminded him of the countryside where he grew up.
In the 18th century Edinburgh, the center of The Scottish Enlightenment, it was an establishment called the Oyster Club that served as an intellectual blender. At the time, oysters were considered egalitarian grub, food of the people. The club's founders - economist Adam Smith and philosopher David Hume - consumed bushels of oysters and cases of claret, while they and the other (all male) members conversed about anything and everything.
Other geniuses that are also worth mentioning for their exceptional food habits are Marie Curie, twice a Nobel laureate, who, as a broke student in Paris, survived for a while on bread and butter, Mark Twain who was a vegetarian and against using animals in research and for educational purposes, and the famous Albert Einstein whose chauffeur reports that he once plucked a grasshopper off the ground and ate it.
