The Weed-Filled Diet Henry Ford Survived On

For better or worse, the 20th century would have looked very different without Henry Ford. Thanks to his model for mass production, automobiles, which were once a luxury item, became affordable to millions of Americans, setting in motion the car-dependent society we all live in today. Thanks to his efforts, the five-day work week became standard, allowing for more leisure time. He was also a fanatical antisemite, using a newspaper he owned to disseminate propaganda against Jews, and a fierce opponent to organized labor. But setting aside matters of good or bad, Ford was also just a very weird guy in general. He was the kind of guy to create a (failed) utopian city in the Amazon rainforest just because, and appeared to be motivated solely by his sheer hatred of farm animals. He also preferred to subsist on weeds that most people pick out of their gardens.

What kind of weeds? All sorts of them. Referring to them as "roadside greens," Ford often made salads and sandwiches out of dandelion, shepherd's purse, milkweed, and wild bergamot. He had this in common with his good friend and fellow eccentric inventor, George Washington Carver, with whom he also shared an interest in plant-based milks — leading to the invention of non-dairy coffee creamer. (If we wanted to be mean, we'd say Ford's taste for weeds sounds like farm animal behavior, but we don't want to be haunted by a vengeful 20th-century industrialist.)

Henry Ford was always indifferent towards food. A biographer referred to him as a "birdseed eater" (not literally, in this case), and mentioned that he would often carry around peanuts or raisins to snack on in lieu of meals. And once he started working on automobiles, he began to see the human body the same way he would see a car. In his view, the stomach was akin to a boiler — the point was to fill it up with some sort of fuel in order to keep the body running smoothly, and enjoying the process was a secondary concern at best. 

Ford was not the only ultra-powerful businessman with a weird relationship to food: Steve Jobs often ate only fruit, while Howard Hughes' germophobia meant he refused to eat with utensils unless they had been wrapped in plastic. But Ford's diet seemed to work for him, at least; he was reputed to be in terrific health, and he managed to live until the age of 83 in a time when that was far from a given for even the richest men. We're not telling you to run into your backyard and pull up a fistful of dandelions, of course, even if they can be fried to make a Southern delicacy — it's more likely that having billions of dollars will do more for your health than eating weeds.