Nietzsche and the Danger for Vegetarians

Nietzsche warned that vegetarian diets could have a narcotic effect and that this could be exploited by gurus and rulers

This essay is part of an occasional series on Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on food, which have received little attention and are generally treated as curiosities lacking sense or purpose or both. This is a shame, because Nietzsche had sophisticated opinions and made penetrating observations about the history and practice of diet, as well as using nutrition, and digestion jn particular, as a highly original metaphor for philosophy and life itself.

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As I said in my last essay, Friedrich Nietzsche’s extensive—though unsystematic and uncollected—thoughts on nutrition are very deeply misunderstood if they’re even understood at all.

In large part, as I suggested, this probably has to do with the fact that most of his interpreters and interlocutors don’t know a single thing about nutrition. And because they don’t know a single thing about nutrition, they can’t work out whether what Nietzsche writes is supposed to be taken literally or metaphorically, or—even worse—whether some aphorism might not simply be a sign of his encroaching madness, probably as a result of syphilis.

Nietzsche did write metaphorically about diet and nutrition. In a later essay, I’ll talk about his use of digestion as an analogy for philosophy and life. Nietzsche went so far as to describe the mind as a stomach and philosophy as a process of discovering what thoughts can be “digested,” usually slowly, and what must be excreted from the body or even prevented from entering the body in the first place to maintain good health. Nietzsche believed each man must find his own spiritual diet and discover the kind of “eater” of ideas he really is.

Anyway, that’s for another day.

Today, I want to talk about a single aphorism from The Gay Science, entitled “Danger for vegetarians.” Here’s the aphorism in full.

Danger for vegetarians—A diet that consists predominantly of rice leads to the use of opium and narcotics, just as a diet that consists predominantly of potatoes leads to the use of liquor. But it also has subtler effects that include ways of thinking and feeling that have narcotic effects. This agrees with the fact that those who promote narcotic ways of thinking and feeling, like some Indian gurus, praise a diet that is entirely vegetarian and would like to impose that as a law upon the masses. In this way they want to create and increase the need that they are in a position to satisfy. (Gay Science, 145)

This aphorism has been greeted with perplexity by philosophers. Michel Onfray, for example, a self-designated “gastrosopher,” wrote, “Les raisons du philosophe sont obscures. Aucune tradition orale ou symbolique, aucune coutume ne fournit d’arguments en ce sens”: “The reasons of the philosopher are obscure. No oral or symbolic tradition, no custom provides arguments for this (La Ventre des Philosophes, 1989).”

The precise origin of the ideas themselves—especially the idea that consumption of rice leads to opium addiction, whereas consumption of potatoes leads to alcoholism—may be obscure and lack obvious roots in any symbolic tradition or custom, but the general argument—that vegetarianism has a “narcotic” or dulling effect—is quite sound and quite ancient, in fact.

I used precisely that general argument, traced back to its earliest roots in Plato’s Republic, to frame my 2022 book The Eggs Benedict Option, which is about the plan for a global plant-based diet and the negative effects it will have on our freedom and health if it is ever realised.

In book II of the Republic, Plato’s Socrates, during an extended discussion with his companions about the origin of society, makes the case that an ideal harmonious society would be one in which the ordinary people were made to keep to a strict vegetarian diet, avoiding animal products except for cheese at all costs. Vegetarianism prevents man’s desires from becoming immoderate. A class of vegetarian workers would be happy with their lot: content to work and reproduce, always fearful of the gods and of the dreadful possibility of war. There would be no need for a complex division of labour, for police or an army in a society of vegetarians.