Feeding Germany: Food, Science, and the Problem of Scarcity, 1871–1923

Abstract

This dissertation examines the impact of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about nutrition on plans for agricultural improvement and food production between 1871 and 1923. It demonstrates that the debate over Germany’s ability to produce enough food to meet its own needs was the product of both internal academic and larger national and transnational economic and political developments, and that the perceived threat of food shortages found both popular and populist political expression in calls for economic autarky. Against the background of new theories about nutritional components and human physiology, political economists, politicians, physiologists, and social commentators initiated an enduring discussion about the exigencies of food provisioning in a rapidly changing, interconnected world economy. By examining the discourse surrounding food security from German unification through the early years of the Weimar Republic, it traces the contours of the scientific establishment which sought to promote agricultural self-sufficiency through rational land use and investment in scientific research. Ultimately, these debates left the confines of the academy and served to heighten public anxiety in the years after World War I. Proposed solutions to the issue of food insecurity hinged on a particularly German conception of development, rooted in ideas of self-sufficiency and self-help that were also exported overseas.