Appetites for Thought by Michel Onfray

Author:Michel Onfray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Nietzsche’s biographer C. P. Janz finds it hard to understand why Nietzsche associates vegetarianism with socialism, other than that at the time of his letter from Basel (September 1869) the city hosted Bakunin and the fourth congress of the International Workingmen’s Association.20 But that is not it at all. In fact, vegetarianism has its illustrious representative in Rousseau; Nietzsche is making his dietary regimen as close as possible to that of he who knows primitive man. Furthermore, the author of Emile issues a warning for carnivores: ‘great eaters of meat are in general more cruel and ferocious than other men.’21 Hence the equations meat = strength = cruelty, vegetables = weakness = kindness, which produce a division between the weak and the strong, and between aristocrats and elites, and democrats and socialists.

Nietzschean dietetics is a science of measure: neither excess (rice, potatoes) nor insufficiency (meat), and proscriptions (alcohol, stimulants) – in order to promote a harmony, a coherence between hygienic practice and necessity.

Housewives’ ignorance of these basic rules of nutrition has produced a Germany that is coarse, heavy, without subtlety. Nietzsche criticizes ‘stupidity in the kitchen’, attacks ‘the woman as cook’ and inveighs against ‘the dreadful thoughtlessness with which the nourishment of the family and the master of the house is provided for’. So ‘it is through bad female cooks – through the complete absence of reason in the kitchen, that the evolution of man has been longest retarded and most harmed: even today things are hardly any better.’22 For a long time the stupid idea has held sway that a man can be made to order at little cost – simplistic eugenicism or the mysterious management of the body. Nietzsche falls into the trap of this platitude and thinks that an appropriate diet has the capacity to produce a well-defined species, with distinct qualities. Nourishment as means of selection. A harmonious balance will produce a controlled vitality, for ‘species which receive plentiful nourishment and an excess of care and protection soon tend very strongly to produce variations of their type and are rich in marvels and monstrosities.’23 Plato falls into just as simplistic a mythology of dietetics as the instrument of eugenicism. Happily, Nietzsche does not pursue this argument. It seems that the hypothesis remains unique in his work and without further development. His lack of any major concern with collective solutions leads him to restrict his science of dietetics to uniquely individual ends.

To German cuisine, heavy and devoid of subtlety, Nietzsche opposes that of Piedmont, which he sees as light and delicate. Against alcohol he lauds the virtues of water and confides that he always carries a cup to drink from the many fountains that adorn Nice, Turin and Sils-Maria. Rather than coffee, he suggests drinking tea, but only in the morning, very strong and in small quantities: ‘Tea is very unwholesome and sicklies one o’er the whole day if it is too weak by a single degree.’24 He also likes chocolate and recommends drinking it for irritating climates unsuitable for drinking tea.

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