The third of Steiner's seven life-processes: the taking-in of outer substance and the start of its transformation into the body's own.
The nourishing process is the third life-process in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy: the activity by which a living being takes in substance from the outer world and starts to transform it into its own. It is not yet digestion as chemistry describes it, but the life-deed standing at the boundary between world and organism, where foreign matter is received so that the inner processes can begin to make it the body's own.
The Nourishing Process in Anthroposophy is the third of the seven life-processes Rudolf Steiner set out in The Riddle of Humanity (GA 170), the lecture cycle he gave at Dornach in August 1916. Where breathing and warming draw the outer world into the body, nourishing takes in foreign substance, food belonging to the plant, animal, or mineral world, and begins the inner labour of making it over into the organism's own. Steiner places nourishing between the world and the self: it is the threshold-process at which what is outside is received, then handed on to secretion, maintaining, and growth, the inner four that re-form it. The bearer is the etheric or life-body, the formative organism that works substance into living form. In Steiner's cosmology these seven processes are the human microcosm answering the seven planets, and nourishing is the deed by which the world becomes body.
In Steiner's Own Words
To characterise this re-forming, I would like to use the same expressions that we have used on previous occasions. Our scientists are not yet aware of these things and therefore have no names for them, so we must formulate our own. The purely inner process that is the basis of the re-forming of what we take in from outside us can be seen to be fourfold. Following the process of nourishing, the first internal process is the process of secretion, of elimination. When the nourishment we have taken in is distributed to our body, this is already the process of secretion; through the process of secretion it becomes part of our organism. The process of elimination does not just work outward, it also separates out that part of our nourishment that is to be absorbed into us.
What it Means Today
The line of practice that took up Steiner's picture of nourishing most directly is anthroposophic nutrition. Where conventional dietetics counts the calorie and the nutrient, Steiner's third life-process asks a different question: not how much substance the food carries, but how much living, formative activity the body must summon to make that substance its own. A foodstuff that arrives already broken down leaves the nourishing process little to do; one that still bears the forces of its growth, the wheat as fruit of the wheat-plant rather than as flour, calls those forces into work. This is why the anthroposophic dietetic tradition weighs the quality of the formative process behind a food, not only its analysis.
The institutions that carried this forward are concrete. Weleda, founded in 1921 by Steiner with the physician Ita Wegman and the chemist Oskar Schmiedel, and the WALA pharmacy behind Dr. Hauschka, founded in 1935 by the chemist Rudolf Hauschka, both built their dietetic and pharmaceutical work on the idea that substance is not inert matter but the bearer of process. Hauschka's own studies of nutrition argued that what nourishes is the rhythmic forming-activity a food awakens, the very re-forming Steiner names in GA 170. Read this way, the nourishing process is the meeting place where the etheric body overcomes the foreign and makes the world into body, the third deed in the sevenfold life Steiner mapped to the planets.
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