Eating Nature in Modern Germany
Food, Agriculture and Environment, c.1870 to 2000

A study of vegetarianism, raw food diets, organic farming, and other 'natural' ways to eat and farm in Germany since 1850.

Corinna Treitel (Author)

9781107188020, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 April 2017

402 pages, 22 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.77 kg

'… well written and carefully researched … Treitel's examination of the discourse on eating naturally challenges our understanding of biopolitics by arguing that biopolitics is the result of both popular impulse to self-rule as well as authoritarian attempts to coerce and as such is coproduced by laypeople and experts.' Gesine Gerhard, The Journal of Modern History

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian and the Dachau concentration camp had an organic herb garden. Vegetarianism, organic farming, and other such practices have enticed a wide variety of Germans, from socialists, liberals, and radical anti-Semites in the nineteenth century to fascists, communists, and Greens in the twentieth century. Corinna Treitel offers a fascinating new account of how Germans became world leaders in developing more 'natural' ways to eat and farm. Used to conserve nutritional resources with extreme efficiency at times of hunger and to optimize the nation's health at times of nutritional abundance, natural foods and farming belong to the biopolitics of German modernity. Eating Nature in Modern Germany brings together histories of science, medicine, agriculture, the environment, and popular culture to offer the most thorough and historically comprehensive treatment yet of this remarkable story.

Introduction. Natural, a German history
1. Hunger, citizenship, and the gospel of nature
2. Being natural
3. Nature and the nutrition question in Imperial and Weimar Germany
4. Humans are only plants in nature's garden: remaking German agriculture, 1870–1939
5. Nature and the Nazi diet
6. Mainstreaming nature, pursuing health: food and the environmental turn in West Germany
7. Masking nature, prescribing health: the East German experience
Conclusion. The natural temptation.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Fascism & Nazism [JPFQ], Food & society [JFCV], European history [HBJD]