Climber Alex Honnold maintains a “99 percent” plant-based diet, punctuated with an occasional Poke Bowl, his publicist told CNN ahead of the climb.
Honnold “grew up eating steak and drinking milk,” and he said he only stopped eating meat — or at least seriously limited it — after extensive research and being concerned about his performance and carbon footprint, he wrote in an Instagram post in 2020.
“It’s a fact that eating less meat and dairy is the simplest way for the average individual to lower their impact,” he wrote, adding that “diet is a spectrum and it’s better to do less harm than more.”
Honnold said he used to be a “super picky eater” in the film “Free Solo” that documented his ascent of El Capitan in 2017.
“Between (the ages of) 20 and 24, I basically decided that I had to start eating vegetables, and then sort of systematically introduced myself to vegetables, like one at a time, which worked pretty well,” he said then.
Ahead of scaling Taipei 101, however, Honnold spent his evenings tasting dumplings at the world-renowned restaurant chain Din Tai Fung, which has a branch under the building and serves vegetarian options.
“He loves dumplings and has been having a great time eating the local cuisine and all the vegetable dumplings,” his publicist told CNN.