Max Rubner and the Biopolitics of Rational Nutrition

Abstract

Eager to move on after the divisiveSonderwegdebates of the 1980s, historians of modern Germany have been busily elaborating a new central narrative around the notion of biopolitics. Aimed at producing a more powerful and productive society by regulating, optimizing, and even exterminating specific human populations, biopolitics has encompassed everything from housing reform, anti-smoking campaigns, and child vaccination programs to pro- and anti-natalist tax policies, national census taking, and the science of industrial hygiene. Identified by Michel Foucault and others as a general feature of all Western modernities, biopolitics has been a particularly fruitful concept for German historians, who have used it to trace the evolution of racial hygiene—the Nazi variant of eugenics and Germany's most infamous application of biopolitical principles—from a politically diverse group of Wilhelmine and Weimar social reformers. The very normality of these reformers, given the international context, has in turn allowed scholars to avoid labeling German modernity as deviant while at the same time framing the murderous dynamic of the Nazi years as a potential latent in modernity more generally. As Edward Ross Dickinson put it in an excellent review article recently, Germany has emerged from this reevaluation “not as a nation having trouble modernizing, but as a nation of troubling modernity.”

Primed for power: a short cultural history of protein

“…65 Although Voit emphasised that he had a particular population in mind and that other demographics would have lower requirements, among the researchers who cited him the figure of 118g/ day became the gold standard for a good diet-anything less than this was Armenkost, a poverty diet. 66 Since it would be hard to achieve such a high protein intake without eating a lot of meat, by the 1880s it was generally accepted among German scientists that meat was a key element of a 'rational diet'. 67 The influence of these ideas went far beyond the German-speaking world.…”

Scientizing Everyday Life, Rationalizing Eating Habits: The Rise of Nutrition Science in 1910s-1920s Japan

“…. 또한 최 근의 식문화사 및 건강・신체문화사 분야의 진전과 함께, 독일과 덴마크의 사례를 통해 합리적 영양과 생명(생체)정치적 실천을 접목한 연구성과가 등 장하고 있다 (Treitel, 2008;Overgaard, 2011). 독일사가인 코리나 트라이텔은 영양학과 관련 정책을 독일 생명정치(biopolitics)의 주요한 장으로서 연구하 는 작업은 인종위생(racial hygiene)과 우생학에 초점을 두어 온 기존의 생명 정치 연구영역을 확장하는 일이 될 것이라 지적한 바 있다 (Treitel, 2008: 2 (Weindling, 1989: 288-289;Levenstein, 1988: 137-146 (村田泰子, 2000; 2001; 眞嶋亜有, 2002 (額田豊, 1915; 1919; 1920; 1926a; 1931; 額田豊, 藤原秋光, 1939 (須藤憲三, 1972-1934) (額田豊, 1920: 38-43).…”

Les déplacements temporaires d’enfants déshérités en Europe centrale pendant la première guerre mondiale.

“…Nutritional science often led to straight criticism of international politics. Having developed his own concept of the ideal, meaning "rational nutrition" in prewar Germany 73 , Max Rubner criticized the Allied Powers in the immediate postwar period for starving out the former enemy by means of their "hunger blockade. 74 " But before their nutritional science resulted in food distribution programs to protect the health of the various nations, during the war the Austrian Wohlfahrtswerk sought less scientific solutions to counter children's malnutrition.…”