Eating "naturally" has proven to be a surprisingly persistent practice in Germany since the onset of industrial modernity. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, ever more Germans have turned to vegetarianism, low-meat diets, macrobiotics, early forms of organic farming, and other such practices in an effort to put the nation, as one early advocate phrased it, on "the way to paradise." The quest to eat naturally, moreover, has attracted figures across the political spectrum, from radical democrat Eduard Baltzer to conservative chancellor Georg Michaels to Nazi revolutionary Adolf Hitler to Greens pioneer Petra Kelly. In writing a book about this complicated cultural and political history, I have struggled with hard questions about nature practices and their ahistorical appeals to nature. What made natural cookery "natural"? What made it materially possible? What made it culturally and politically compelling and to whom? In my brief presentation, I will discuss how I formulated answers to these questions for the period circa 1900, when eating naturally first became widely popular in Germany. Natural cookery, in short, will be my vehicle for proposing how we might restore historical specificity to nature practices and even discover common elements that bind them together.
See more of: Central European History Society
See more of: Affiliated Society Sessions