Triumph of the Till

Abstract

“Leave our food as natural as possible!” Whether or not you agree with this statement, it probably sounds familiar. Natural food advocates have a vested interest in convincing you that their foods are better: environmentally for our planet, physiologically for our bodies, and ethically for animals and other humans. In one particularly clever ad released on You-Tube by the Organic Trade Association, “the organic rebellion” battles for control of the American supermarket against “the dark side of the farm.” The rebels are Cuke Skywalker, Obi Wan Cannoli, Tofu D2, Chew Broccoli, and Princess Lettuce; on the dark side are Darth Tater (“more chemical than vegetable”) and his band of genetically modified, irradiated, and pesticide-saturated followers. A quick glance at the thousands of comments below the video confirms that even children have no trouble getting the message: Natural is good, artificial is bad.How strange, then, to realize that “Leave our food as natural as possible!” started as a Nazi slogan. Werner Kollath, the physician who came up with it in 1942, was an expert on vitamins and diseases linked to nutritional deficiencies as well as a member of the Nazi Party. As dean of the medical school at the University of Rostock in northern Germany, he openly supported forced sterilization and other eugenic policies closely tied to racial war and genocide. By the standards of his time and place, he was both a good scientist and a good party member. After Germany’s defeat and division, however, Kollath found himself shut out of the academy because of his Nazi past. Undaunted, he found non-academic channels for promoting his vision of German dietary reform, enjoying great success as a medical popularizer before his death in 1970. His call to “leave our food as natural as possible” lives on today, in Germany and elsewhere.Kollath was not an outlier. To begin to understand the degree to which diet mattered to the Nazis, consider the following: Adolf Hitler ate mostly vegetarian and organic foods. So did Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the Nazi Party. Heinrich Himmler, who presided over the SS and was a main architect of the Holocaust, was not a vegetarian, but he did lend strong support to the cause of organic farming. And these were not just the personal predilections of party leaders. Urging Germans to eat more naturally was, in fact, a regular theme in Nazi propaganda. In 1934, the state-funded exhibit “German People, German Workers” included guidelines on how to eat in the Third Reich. Germans were advised give up beef, pork, white bread, refined sugar, and alcoholic drinks, and to eat more unpeeled potatoes, rye bread, fresh fruits and vegetables, cheese, and eggs, supplemented with a few herring and a glass of mineral water.As to why a regime infamous for crimes against humanity devoted any time at all to natural food, part of the answer lies with the memory of World War I. Hunger, Nazi officials knew, had been central to Germany’s experience of the Great War. British blockades of German ports from late 1914 until after the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 had exploited Germany’s dependence on a global nutritional economy, with dire consequences. Access to imported meats, grains, and, perhaps most importantly, nitrogenous fertilizers suddenly ceased and severe food shortages set in. After the war ended, experts blamed up to 1 million additional deaths in Germany on malnutrition. Hunger, moreover, pushed many Germans into open revolt against their government in 1917 and contributed to the country’s military defeat the following year. With memories of wartime hunger still fresh in the 20s and 30s, German political leaders of all stripes dedicated significant energy to ensuring that nutritional disaster on that scale could never happen again. That meant reorganizing the way the country ate and farmed so that Germans, as much as possible, could feed themselves with their own labor on their own fields. Instead of relying on foods that grew poorly in German soil or used agricultural resources inefficiently (e.g., wheat, grain-fed beef, schnapps), consumers were urged to switch to German-grown potatoes, fruits, vegetables, rye, and legumes, as well as German dairy products and fish caught in national waters. Farmers were pushed to embrace intensive industrial methods, especially the new crown jewel of German chemical engineering: synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers produced by giant chemical concerns like BASF. (The Nazis never had a consistent position on synthetic fertilizer: While the party promoted it, several top leaders worried that it poisoned crops.) Nazi planners, in short, regarded food as a national security issue, and made achieving autarky (nutritional self-sufficiency) a top priority.The Nazis, it is important to note, did not invent the practice of eating naturally. Rather, they co-opted it from a vibrant and poorly understood German subculture known as “life reform.” The movement, which sought to make modern lifestyles healthier by making them more natural, emerged in the last third of the 19th century and grew to include vegetarians, naturopaths, nudists, anti-vaccinationists, early organic farmers, temperance advocates, anti-vivisectionists, and many other kinds of activists. In political terms, the movement spanned liberals, socialists, and anti-Semites in the 19th century, and fascists, communists, and Greens in the 20th.Life reformers first hit on the idea of eating naturally in the 1860s. Eduard Baltzer, who pioneered the movement, was a left-wing Prussian progressive who, after starting off as a dissenting Protestant minister, became a democrat in 1848 when it was mortally dangerous to do so, and then converted to “the natural diet” (vegetarianism) in the 1860s as a matter of ethics. Democracy and diet, he believed, had an intimate connection. Baltzer observed poor, hungry, landless Germans—the original proletarians—flocking to cities for low-paying jobs in factories while large landowning elites grew richer and richer producing food that provided little nourishment, such as beets for extracting sugar, grain for distilling schnapps, and cattle raised on land that could better be used for growing crops. (Baltzer liked to point out that it took 10 times as much land to feed a meat-eater as a vegetarian.) In an argument that predated Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet (1971) by more than a century, Baltzer offered elaborate calculations that showed just how this shift in the agricultural economy drove food inequality, which in turn fueled political inequality and instability. Adopting a more natural diet, Baltzer argued, was not just a matter of health, but also one of social justice and national survival.In the early years of the 20th century, unhappy with the dirt, noise, and poverty of big cities, life-reform farmers went back to the land to find a different way to live. They ran farms that deemphasized animals, which were used as a source of labor and manure, but not raised for food. They also said “no” to imported fertilizers (e.g., guano and Chile Nitrate from South America) and “yes” to more “natural” fertilizers such as green manures (nitrogen-fixing cover crops, which are coming back into fashion today), ground German stones, and composted human and farm waste. Often with a good dose of anti-Semitism toward the Jews who supposedly dominated this import economy, life-reform farmers promised that natural agriculture would promote German self-sufficiency while making German bodies healthier.In 1924, natural farming took an organic turn when Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner (of Waldorf School fame) gave a series of lectures at Koberwitz, a large estate in Silesia, on what came to be known as “biodynamic” farming. Responding to the massive agricultural crisis that emerged through a combination of dust storms, declining soil fertility, and falling crop yields, Steiner urged his audience of landowners to give up synthetic fertilizers and devote themselves instead to intensively recycling every organic product on their farms except human waste. The goal was to make rich composts for feeding the soil. To that end, elaborate astrological rituals—this was life reform, after all, and practitioners often dabbled in occultism—were developed to charge these compost heaps with cosmic life forces. Biodynamics struck many Germans at the time as odd, to say the least, and most farmers continued to rely on industrial methods through the early 1930s.Then, in 1933, the Nazis came to power. They arrived with a vision of creating a racially pure society in which robust Aryans would have healthy babies while living harmoniously on German soil. The pursuit of this dream led to genocide, but perhaps more surprisingly, it also led to an organic herb garden at the Dachau concentration camp. Established in 1933 as Nazi Germany’s first camp for its political enemies, in the 1940s, with Heinrich Himmler’s blessing, Dachau played host to an elaborate organic-farming experiment supervised by Ernst-Günther Schenck, a high-level Nazi physician. Camp prisoners were forced to tend to the biodynamic herb garden and work in an on-site factory drying the harvest. In packages neatly stamped with the logo of the Dachau garden, the herbs were then sold to racially desirable consumers, including the SS. It was a typical Nazi scheme: use resources efficiently, including the labor of camp prisoners, in order to make Aryans healthy and strong, and to bring the state closer to autarky. In this line of thinking, there was no conflict between war, genocide, eating naturally, and running a police state.Werner Kollath may not have known about the Dachau herb garden (it was undertaken quietly), but he was certainly aware of the natural practices that life reformers had pioneered years before. In fact, he had co-opted their “natural diet” to develop an elaborate plan for remaking nutritional habits in the Third Reich. The “full-value diet,” as he called it, was designed to solve the “half-hunger” typical in advanced industrial societies. Consumers had many food options, Kollath noticed, yet they seemed unable to make good dietary choices. They studiously avoided eating healthy foods—that is, foods rich in vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients—and consequently lived in a chronic state of malnutrition. What Germans needed was a guide to help them choose foods that were as close to being natural and “whole” as possible. To that end, Kollath’s full-value diet divided foods into three groups: “living,” “minimally processed,” and “dead.” In the first category he put plants and dairy foods left in their raw state. In the second category he included wholegrain breads, hard-boiled eggs, high-quality cheese, cooked meats, and so on. And in the final category, Kollath listed foods so highly processed and fragmented that they held no nutritional value at all. The clever illustration on page 83 turns the whole system into a visual allegory. On the left, winged fruits, vegetables, nuts, and bees fly up to the sun. Those foods are alive, and Germans are encouraged to eat them in abundance. On the right are the unnatural foods, and this is where the iconography gets dark. White sugar rots a tooth, a dead cow flops out of a can, the devil distills schnapps, and at the very bottom, as far away from the sun as possible, a man who has spent his life eating poorly lies in a hospital bed while a nurse and doctor observe his death throes with clinical detachment. The message could not be starker: Eat whole natural foods and live a long healthy life, or eat unnatural processed foods and die an awful early death. The choice is yours.The Nazis dreamed big about nature, but they also borrowed their thinking from an earlier generation whose political commitments had been all over the map. They then reshaped those strategies into tools for waging war and building a racial utopia. This is a disturbing piece of history, particularly for those who believe that eating more naturally—less meat, more plants, less processed and high-input food, more organic and local food—will save us and our planet. The past cannot tell us how to eat or farm today. It cannot adjudicate what is natural or artificial, provide arguments for or against organic agriculture, determine whether GMOs are the best thing for a hungry planet or a dangerous sign of the coming apocalypse. But it can remind us that contemporary debates about organic food and farming stretch back to the 19th century and have various roots, including ones in the Nazi movement. The moral arc of the Organic Trade Association video might read very differently to American viewers if they imagined Cuke Skywalker and his band of brothers as gun-toting, right-wing libertarians. (And they very well could be: The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, after all, was planned on an organic farm in Michigan.) Having written a book about the German relationship to food as an American watching her own historical moment with interest, I have come to appreciate the deep pull of what I call “the natural temptation”: the belief that turning to nature will help us solve the problems of industrial modernity, from pollution to chronic illness to globalization and beyond. Whether you are a proponent or a critic or just on the fence, what the Nazi episode suggests is that we belong to a larger historical moment. The natural temptation emerged more than a century ago, and it seems to be here to stay, at least for a while.