The fascination that continues to generate Steve Jobs seems inexhaustible, both for his professional legacy and for that almost mythical halo that he has left behind as an inspiring guru beyond the technological and business world. Their wacky eating habits They are well known, and they may have started in his university days, where, according to his own words, he learned what hunger was.
But the co-founder of Apple did not regret it, on the contrary; he embraced the experience and was deeply grateful to have discovered what it was live hungry each day, something that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He recounted it in the famous speech he gave at Reed College, when he received the Vollum Award for Distinguished Achievement in Science and Technology, in August 1991.
Food of Roman soldiers to subsist
Jobs never actually graduated. Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, was too expensive for what his parents could afford, but he was so insistent that he enrolled in 1972. He stayed penniless in the first semester and he secretly abandoned his studies, although he would return later to spend a year and a half alone as a listener.
In addition to what he learned in calligraphy, Jobs would later highlight the hard experience of those bad years as the most valuable thing he took from his university days. And something that would mark him forever was the peculiar diet to which he was forced to follow.
“The second experience I remember is being hungry,” he says in his speech. “All the time. The cafeteria here quickly taught me to be a vegetarian.” He confesses that he had so little money that could only afford a Coke and he would go with her to the nearest store in search of something to be able to put in his stomach. And so she discovered the cheapest way to eat, a product called Roman Meal.
“Roman food” is the trade name of a brand founded by Canadian physician George Robert Jackson in the early 20th century, who said he was inspired by the diet of roman soldiers to design a cereal mix that was nutritious and healthy. The company would later evolve into one of the most popular commercial bread brands in the United States.
For Steve Jobs, that mixture of cereals and whole grainsVitamin-enriched and originally designed to be eaten hot, they were a lifesaver. it was the food cheaper that he could buy at any local store and the only thing that, he claimed at the time, fed him for several months.
Live hungry all your life
Both the experience of suffering from true hunger and being satisfied with eating a single vegetable food during that university stay would mark Jobs’s life forever. Even when he stopped experiencing hardships he continued showing off hunger no longer as suffering, but as a way of life, a permanent state with which to live.
“I am grateful that they have taught me to be hungry and to keep it with me all my life”
This idea is connected with the philosophy of life that he would soon embrace, linked to zen mysticism, meditation and to the ascetic experiences that he lived in India. In addition to being a strict vegan, he practiced fasts, purges and periods of eating only one food, just like you already did with your Roman cereals in college. Some habits that today are classified as eating disorders and that would only aggravate the delicate health that he suffered derived from the pancreatic cancer that he suffered.
“Character is not forged in good times, but in bad; not in times of plenty, but in times of adversity, and this school seems to feed that spirit of adversity, and I think it builds some character,” Jobs concluded his award acceptance speech “I appreciate that you have taught to be hungry and keep it with me for the rest of my life”.
Steve Jobs (Biographies and Memoirs)
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