Fruitarianism

Apple founder, Steve Jobs, followed a strict fruitarian diet, and so did the Emperor Augustus, but I wonder about their reasons.

Photo by Cristina Anne Costello on Unsplash

Gorgeous, brightly colored, sweet and juicy fruit calls me in the grocery store

I’ve been in a fruit-eating phase for a while now. Mostly, it has to do with the sensuous ease of it. The oranges right now, for example, are exquisite. Easy to peel, juicy, sweet. Zero prep time. This doesn’t play into any conscious decision on my part, but I tell myself there haven’t been antibiotics or hormones injected into the oranges, blueberries, or mangos. Still, the farmers in this country use toxic chemicals to fertilize and to kill insects, so I’m probably delusional on the point about fruit being less toxic than the meat I consume. I found this comprehensive guide to which fruit and vegetables to avoid or wash the hell out of: https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/dirty-dozen.php

I’m diabetic. I shouldn’t be eating fruit at all, according to some guidelines or other, but there are days now when I can’t bring myself to eat another egg or slice of bacon, so in the interest of eating anything at all, I reach for an emergency banana. I often hold Steve Jobs up for my own inspection, because he ate nothing but fruit, and was really hard-headed about it. And that killed him. In my reading I learned that he could have had surgery in good time to save his life, but he chose alternative medicine and a really radical approach to his fruit only diet. (Check this interview with Ashton Kutcher who played Jobs and ended up in the hospital with Pancreatitis while trying to follow Jobs’ routine.)

I also read a suggestion that the Emperor Augustus ate only fruit for fear of being poisoned. So I searched, and came across this funny thread on Reddit. It opens with this title “…according to rumour, the emperor Augustus, suspecting that his wife was trying to poison him, refused to eat anything except figs that he had picked himself. His wife smeared poison on the figs while they were still on the tree to preempt him.” Commentators generally agree that this is a myth. Here’s some Reddit commentary on the subject:

What is a writer to do with this?

My writer brain immediately conflated Steve Jobs with the Emperor Augustus, and began to wonder if Jobs had a similar fear of being poisoned. And in light of all the allegations of Epstein’s nefarious activities, I needed to ask... Is Jobs on the list? So far, his name has NOT turned up on the list, though his widow Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the wealthiest women in the world, owner of The Atlantic, clearly had ties to Ghislane Maxwell. (Reddit didn’t disappoint.)

I want to give Steve and Laurene a pass… but who knows? Laurene inherited a huge fortune and a lot of responsibilities… I bet people like Epstein and Maxwell saw her as a prime target, so of course she was invited to hang out. I need to know more before I form a true opinion of Laurene Powell Jobs. She’s also done a lot of good with all that money.

Remember we’re in writer brain here… pure supposition territory

I’m making a lot of intellectual leaps with this because I’m already cooking a story in my head—a fictional story filled with made up characters, situations, etc. So, I did what we do these days, I consulted the Internet. In fact, I consulted Wikipedia. (I know, my former students, I taught you never to admit to using Wikipedia on the Works Cited page, but if you will recall, I explained also that it can be a quick way to BEGIN your research. There’s a list of primary resources at the bottom of the page... and I’M THINKING FICTION.)

So, then the next thing I did was skim the whole “Steve Jobs” Wikipedia page. Remember, I came looking for my budding theory that Jobs somehow felt threatened by the other billionaire-class folks like Epstein, and ate fruit because he thought he may be poisoned. He had a lot of influence.

In the grand overview of Jobs’ life at the top of the page, I noticed that he did a lot more in his life than I realized. I tend to think of him as the guy who started Apple, but that is just where he got started. He and his buddies Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne co-founded Apple Inc. in 1976. I almost had that part correct. But Jobs operated at a different level from “normal” humans. He was blindingly intelligent. I had forgotten that among other things like NeXT, Inc., which was aimed at creating workstations for students, in 1986, after he left Apple, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm that became Pixar. By 1997, Apple was in trouble, and Jobs stepped back in and revived the company. I’m not going to get into all the products he guided into development. At the time of this writing, Jobs holds over 450 patents. The thing I love about this big picture of the guy is that it shows him not only as a scientist and an engineer, it shows him as an artist.

“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics... then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”—Steve Jobs[1]

Why might a man like Jobs fear poisoning?

Steve Jobs was a powerful man, and people like Epstein, if not Epstein himself, likely sought influence with him. But so far, at least, no link has been revealed to Jobs in connection to those ugly files. Is it possible that Jobs, who trained as a Zen Buddhist, was above such temptations?

His biological father was Syrian, and a Muslim working toward a PhD in Political Science. His mother was American of German Catholic descent. Ultimately, that relationship didn’t work out, and the baby was given up for adoption. I highlight this because in the back of my mind I recalled that he had some sort of middle eastern lineage.

Jobs was a rebellious, super-intelligent teen, and he was raised well outside the realms of the wealthy elite class of the day. Did he refuse Epstein’s influence peddling? Might he have felt threatened? I’ll close with one more bit of research to whet the appetite… Here is a 2012 Wired Article that describes the FBI’s file on Steve Jobs. It reveals that Jobs wasn’t free of scandal or personality quirks. He did LSD at some point, and some of his employees and board members didn’t like him. But he passed the background check (early 1990s) and was cleared to join George H.W. Bush’s cabinet. Again… it’s all supposition and writer brain at work here…

Do any of you see a story here? Where are my crime fiction and espionage writers?

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[1] qtd. in Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011)