Quick Answer
Steiner talking to carpenters about what happens to bread after you swallow it. The workers' lectures are the most accessible thing he produced, because the audience had no anthroposophical vocabulary and he had to explain without it. This selection on food covers digestion as a fourfold process, the potato and the grains, protein, fat, salt, alcohol and coffee, vegetarianism, and the claim that eating is the most spiritual thing the body does. Some of it is observation that has aged well. Some is the source of the movement's stranger dietary folklore. All of it is readable.
Key Takeaways
- Digestion is fourfold: the whole human being eats, not the stomach alone.
- Food must be destroyed before it nourishes, and the destroying is the point.
- The potato is the famous claim; the grain argument behind it is the interesting one.
- Vegetarianism recommended, never imposed, and he says why.
- Read it as conversation, since that is what it was.
16 min read
What This Book Is
Nutrition and Health is a selection from the lectures Rudolf Steiner gave to the workers building the second Goetheanum between 1922 and 1924, chosen for their bearing on food, digestion and the body. The Rudolf Steiner Press edition gathers the main lectures on the subject from the workers' volumes, chiefly from GA 348 and GA 354.
The lectures are transcripts of talks given at the building site, usually in the morning before work, in response to questions the workers put. They were not intended for publication and were not revised by Steiner.
The result is a book unlike his systematic works. It is conversational, repetitive as speech is repetitive, full of examples and asides, and pitched at people who had never read a page of anthroposophy. That makes it the easiest Steiner to read and, in some ways, the most revealing.
Editions. The Rudolf Steiner Press volume titled Nutrition and Health is the standard selection. Related material appears in Nutrition: Food, Health and Spiritual Development, a broader anthology, and in the full workers' volumes, From Comets to Cocaine, From Elephants to Einstein and the rest, which contain the same lectures among many others. For the food material alone, this selection is the one to get.
The Workers' Lectures
The genre needs explaining, because it shapes everything.
After the first Goetheanum burned on New Year's Eve 1922, a large crew was employed to build its concrete successor. Some of them asked whether Steiner would talk to them, and from 1922 until his final illness in 1924 he did so regularly, at the site, taking questions on any subject the men raised. They asked about the stars, about volcanoes, about illness, about food, about ghosts, about the origin of language, about why the sea is salt.
He answered in ordinary German, drawing on a blackboard, using examples from farm and kitchen, and without the terminology of his other work. He treated the questions as serious and the men as capable of following him, and the transcripts show them following.
Fourteen volumes of these talks survive. They are the nearest thing to hearing Steiner think aloud, and the nutrition lectures are among the most vivid.
Digestion as a Fourfold Process
The framework Steiner brings to every question about food.
The human being, in his anthropology, is fourfold: physical body, etheric or life body, astral or soul body, and ego. He explains to the workers, without the terms, that digestion involves all four. The physical body receives the food; the life forces break it down; the soul forces, feeling and desire, drive appetite and select what is taken up; and the ego, the warmth and will of the person, transforms what remains into the body's own substance.
Eating, in this picture, is an activity of the whole person and not a chemical process in a tube. What a food does depends on which of the four it engages and how.
The framework is Steiner's and cannot be tested from outside it. What can be said is that it lets him say specific and often interesting things about particular foods, and that the specifics are what the book is about.
Destroying to Nourish
The single most important idea in the lectures, and the one most worth extracting.
Steiner insists that the body cannot use food as it arrives. Everything eaten must be broken down completely, killed, reduced to something with no trace of its origin, before the body can build from it. The nourishment is not in the food; it is in the body's activity of destroying the food and making its own substance.
Foods that are easy to break down leave the body idle and weak. Foods that require effort to break down exercise it and strengthen it. The value of a food is therefore partly in the resistance it offers.
This turns ordinary thinking about nutrition around. We are not what we eat; we are what we do to what we eat. The idea runs through every specific claim in the book and it is the one a reader is most likely to keep.
Steiner's example for the workers was milk. A calf drinks its mother's milk and grows; a human drinks cow's milk and does not become a cow. Why not? Because the human body destroys the cow's protein utterly and rebuilds it as human protein. If the destruction were incomplete, if any trace of cow remained, the body would be poisoned by it. Digestion is a war against the foreignness of food, and health is the body's power to win it completely. That is his picture, and however one judges the mechanism, it is a picture in which the body is active and not a vessel.
Protein
The lectures on protein are where the destroying idea is worked out most fully.
Protein, Steiner says, is the most foreign of foods, the closest to living substance, and therefore the one the body must work hardest to destroy. Too much protein overwhelms this work: the body cannot break it all down, some of it remains partly foreign, and the result is a burden that shows itself in inflammation, in sluggishness of the ego's activity, and over time in illness.
He was arguing against the high-protein orthodoxy of the 1920s, which held that a working man needed large quantities of meat, and he tells the workers that they need far less than they have been told.
The claim about quantity has been broadly vindicated. The mechanism, the ego's work in destroying protein, is his own.
Fat and Warmth
Fat, by contrast, is the food most closely connected with warmth, and warmth in Steiner's anthropology is the element of the ego. He describes fat as the substance the body can most easily make its own, and as the food that supports the ego's presence in the body.
He distinguishes plant fats from animal fats and discusses which suit which constitutions. He is not, as some later readers assumed, opposed to fat; he regards it as the food most akin to the human warmth-organism.
Grains and the Potato
The famous section, and worth getting right.
Steiner's argument is about where in the body a food is digested. Grains, he says, are broken down in the metabolic system and nourish the whole organism, including the head, through the blood. The potato is different: its starch is so easily converted that the work of digesting it is not finished in the metabolism but pushed up into the head, where it burdens the very organ that should be free for thinking.
His conclusion, delivered to the workers as a historical observation, is that the spread of the potato as the staple food of European labourers from the eighteenth century onward went together with a weakening of independent thinking in the populations that adopted it, and that the grains it replaced had supported that thinking.
The claim has been laughed at for a century and it deserves a fairer hearing than it gets. The historical correlation is real, though it has other explanations. The point about the difference between whole grains and refined starch has become nutritional common sense. What remains Steiner's alone is the mechanism, digestion in the head, and that should be taken as his anthropology speaking rather than as physiology.
Salt and Thinking
A short section that shows the method.
Salt, Steiner tells the workers, goes to the head and is the food most connected with the nerve-sense system and with thinking. A person who takes too little salt becomes dreamy and cannot hold a thought; too much makes thinking rigid. Sugar, by contrast, gives the ego a footing in the body, which is why people who feel their sense of self weak crave sweetness.
The observations about craving are recognisable. The assignment of each substance to a member and a system is the pattern the whole book follows: every food has its place in the fourfold human being, and eating is a way of adjusting the balance among the four.
Meat and Vegetarianism
The section most often quoted selectively.
Steiner was a vegetarian and tells the workers that a vegetarian diet suits spiritual development, because plant food demands more of the body's own transforming activity than animal food, which arrives already half-transformed by the animal.
He then says, with equal force, that vegetarianism must never be imposed; that a person whose constitution needs meat will be harmed by giving it up; that one should not become vegetarian out of principle but only when the body itself no longer wants meat; and that a forced vegetarianism produces a kind of weakness and spiritual conceit worse than any meat-eating.
Both halves are in the text. The movement has tended to quote the first and forget the second. The second is the more characteristic of him.
Alcohol, Coffee, Tea
The lectures on stimulants are among the funniest and most quoted.
Alcohol, Steiner says, does in the body what the ego should do: it produces warmth, it drives the blood, it gives a feeling of self. Because alcohol does this work, the ego does not, and so weakens. The drinker feels more himself and is less himself. He does not moralise about it; he describes the mechanism and leaves the workers to decide.
Coffee, he says, tightens the thinking, holds the thoughts together in sequence, which is why journalists drink it. Tea loosens the thinking, lets it scatter and associate, which is why diplomats drink it. He is half joking and half not.
The section is a good example of the lectures' tone: concrete, unpreachy, and interested in what things actually do rather than in whether they are permitted.
Raw and Cooked
Steiner treats cooking as a partial digestion done outside the body. Cooked food demands less of the body's forces; raw food demands more. A strong organism benefits from the exercise of raw food; a weak one is exhausted by it. He warns against raw food regimes as a general prescription for the same reason he warns against imposed vegetarianism: the question is always what the particular body can do.
The principle is the same throughout the book. There is no ideal diet. There is a fourfold human being with a particular constitution, and food is a way of working with it.
Food and Illness
Several of the workers' questions were about sickness, and Steiner's answers connect diet to his medical thinking.
He describes illness, in the terms he used with the doctors, as an imbalance between the building-up and breaking-down processes in the body, and he places most dietary illness on the side of insufficient breaking-down: food that has not been fully destroyed and so remains foreign in the organism, producing what he calls deposits and what later medicine would describe in other terms. Gout, rheumatism and various digestive complaints are explained this way to the workers, with protein excess as the usual culprit.
He also discusses the reverse: a body that breaks down too much and builds too little, which he connects with wasting conditions and with a diet too thin to give the organism anything to work on.
The picture is the same one anthroposophic medicine still uses, and a reader who wants to understand why its practitioners ask about diet before anything else will find the reasoning laid out here more plainly than in the medical courses themselves.
Feeding Children
A section that connects to the pedagogy.
Steiner discusses milk as the food of the first years, the transition to grains, the danger of giving children foods that burden the head before the head is ready, and the relation between what a child eats and how the child's thinking develops. The potato appears again, as a food to be limited for children.
The advice is consistent with what he told the Waldorf teachers elsewhere and is the source of the dietary customs in Waldorf kindergartens: grains, cooked vegetables, little sugar, and a rhythm of meals.
The Spiritual Side of Eating
The claim the whole book rests on and states most directly near the end.
Steiner tells the workers that eating is the most spiritual thing the body does, because in digestion the human being takes what is foreign, destroys it completely, and creates its own substance out of the destruction. That is what the spirit does in general, and the body does it every day with bread.
He connects this to the idea, developed elsewhere, that the earth's substances carry forces from their origin, in sun and soil, and that the body in digesting them receives those forces as well as the material. Food grown in a way that preserves the forces nourishes differently from food grown in a way that destroys them.
That last thought is the bridge to the Agriculture Course.
The Link to Biodynamics
The nutrition lectures and the Agriculture Course of June 1924 belong together, and the movement has always read them so.
The Agriculture Course describes how food should be grown so that it carries the forces Steiner says the human being needs: the farm as an organism, the preparations, the attention to cosmic rhythms. The nutrition lectures describe what happens when that food is eaten. Neither makes full sense without the other, and a reader of this book who wants to know why biodynamic growers care about what they care about will find part of the answer here.
What Holds Up
A fair accounting.
The recommendation of whole grains over refined starch; the warning against excess protein; the account of alcohol as substituting for the body's own activity; the insistence that diet must fit the individual constitution; the caution against dogmatic vegetarianism and raw food regimes; the emphasis on rhythm and moderation. All of these have aged well and several were against the orthodoxy of their day.
The fourfold mechanism, the digestion of the potato in the head, the assignment of salt to thinking and sugar to the ego, the transmission of cosmic forces through food. These are Steiner's anthropology applied to the kitchen, and they are not claims that physiology can assess.
The book is at its best when the observation is separable from the mechanism, and a reader can usually make the separation.
The Objections
Three.
Unrevised transcripts. Steiner did not check these texts, and they contain repetitions, loose statements and things he might have put differently in writing.
Mechanisms that cannot be tested. The fourfold digestion is the framework for every claim and is not open to evidence from outside anthroposophy.
The folklore they generated. The potato claim in particular has been repeated in the movement as a rule rather than as the historical observation Steiner offered, and the book is the source of a good deal of dietary superstition it did not intend.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have heard the potato claim and want to see what Steiner actually said, in context, to whom.
Read it if you work in biodynamics or anthroposophic medicine and want the nutritional side of the picture from the source.
Read it if you have found Steiner unreadable. This is the exception, and it may send you back to the rest.
Read it as talk, not as doctrine. That is what it was, and it is best taken that way.
The idea that lasts is that nourishment is something the body does, not something it receives. Food is foreign until the body has destroyed it and made its own substance from the remains, and the health of a person is the strength of that destroying and rebuilding. A diet that does all the work in advance, refined, pre-digested, effortless, leaves the body with nothing to do and lets it weaken. Steiner told the carpenters this in 1923 with a blackboard and a loaf of bread. The mechanism was his; the observation has outlived it.
Steiner on food, to the people building his house, in plain language.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our distinction between the observations that hold up and the mechanisms that do not is set out above and was not softened for the link. Nothing here is dietary advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Nutrition and Health?
A selection of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in 1923 and 1924 to the workers building the Goetheanum, answering their questions about food, digestion, and the effects of particular foods on body and mind.
Who were the workers?
The builders, carpenters and labourers constructing the second Goetheanum at Dornach. From 1922 Steiner met them regularly, took questions on any subject, and answered in plain language. Around fourteen volumes of these talks survive.
Is it a diet book?
No. There are no meal plans. Steiner describes what different foods do in the body according to his anthropology, explains digestion as a spiritual as well as chemical process, and answers specific questions from the audience.
What does he say about the potato?
That its widespread adoption in Europe weakened human thinking, because the potato is digested largely in the head and burdens it, whereas grains nourish the whole organism. It is his most famous and most mocked claim.
What does he say about protein?
That the body does not simply absorb protein but must break it down completely and rebuild it, that excess protein is a burden, and that the process of destroying and rebuilding is where the ego's activity in digestion lies.
Is he a vegetarian?
He was, and he recommends vegetarianism as suited to spiritual development, but he is emphatic that it must not be imposed, that some constitutions need meat, and that a forced vegetarianism does harm.
What is the fourfold view of digestion?
That the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego each participate in digestion at different stages, from the breaking down of food to the building of the body's own substance, so that eating is an activity of the whole human being.
What does he say about alcohol and coffee?
That alcohol takes over the work the ego should do and so weakens it; that coffee tightens thinking and tea loosens it; and that these effects are real and should be chosen knowingly rather than condemned.
Is any of it supported by science?
Some observations, on the value of whole grains, the burden of excess protein and the effects of alcohol, align with later findings. The mechanisms he gives are his own and are not scientific claims in the ordinary sense.
How does it relate to biodynamics?
The Agriculture Course of 1924 is the other side of the same picture: how food should be grown so that it carries the forces Steiner says nourish the human being. The two courses were given within months of each other.
Is it readable?
Unusually so for Steiner. The workers' lectures are conversational, concrete and often funny. He explains anthroposophical ideas without the vocabulary, because his audience did not have it.
Who should read it?
Anyone in the Waldorf, biodynamic or anthroposophic medical world who has heard the potato claim and wants the context, and readers who want the most accessible Steiner there is.
Ask what the food asks of you
Steiner's question to the workers was never whether a food was good or bad. It was what the food demanded of the body and whether the body could meet the demand. Try that question at the next meal. Not: is this healthy? But: what will my body have to do with this, and can it? A loaf of real bread asks a great deal. A spoon of sugar asks nothing. He thought the asking was the nourishment, and a century of easier food has not proved him wrong.
Sources & References
- Steiner, Rudolf. Nutrition and Health: Two Lectures to Workmen and related lectures, Rudolf Steiner Press, from GA 348 and GA 354.
- Steiner, Rudolf. Nutrition: Food, Health and Spiritual Development, ed. Andrew Maendl.
- Steiner, Rudolf. Agriculture Course, GA 327.
- Steiner, Rudolf. From Comets to Cocaine and From Elephants to Einstein, the workers' lecture volumes.
- Hauschka, Rudolf. Nutrition: A Holistic Approach, the anthroposophic development.
- Historical studies of the potato and European diet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.