Food Nazi
Terms such as Nazi and Fascist are thrown around a little too freely these days, a handy way of describing anyone whose opinions or politics you don’t like. From third wave feminists, liberal pacifists, reality TV stars playing politics, medical professionals recommending face masks, or those who favour a low taxation, free market economy, everyone can now be labelled a Fascist. But a few cherry-picked elements of fascism-adjacent policy, or even some genuine hatred and racism, does not a fascist make. There are differences, and it is important to recognise them. Especially right now.
The terrifying truth is that for most people living under fascism in the 1930s, it probably didn’t feel particularly evil. Until it was. Although most of us rightly focus on the blood thirsty genocide and the violent expansionism when trying to understand fascist ideology, little attention is paid to the early days. The days when fascism appealed to millions of ordinary people across a Europe ravaged by war, depression and disease. European fascists did not rise to power with open talk of racial murder and invasion, because sensible people abhor such things, even when times are hard. To capture hearts and minds, early fascist rhetoric often sounded quite sensible, perhaps progressive, even to our modern ear.
For various reasons, I’ve recently spent quite a lot of time researching European food policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although many mock the idea of food being fascist (something I learnt when I accidently read the comments section under my UnHerd article earlier this year), to understand fascism in the 1930s, attitudes to food and agriculture are key. Because far from being an obscure, benign subset of fascist policy, food is at the heart of much of the evil that swept across Europe at that time.
Hitler firmly believed that food shortages on the home front had lost Germany the Great War, and understood that if a nation did not control its own food supply, it could never do as it pleased on the world stage. History shows this to be the case. Dangerous, autocratic regimes frequently push for food autarky, attempting to produce all that they need at home.
For this reason, the Nazis were very much against free international trade, especially when it came to food. They understood that if they were going to engage in policies that the rest of the world might find abhorrent, they would have to ensure they could not be starved into submission. The same was true in Italy, where Mussolini engaged in his infamous Battle for the Grain, a thoroughly misguided attempt to convert much of Italy’s agriculture to wheat, permanently destroying countless olive groves and vineyards in the process.
As Germany pushed for food self-sufficiency, the Nazi’s actions were far from those of free market capitalists. By the mid 1930s, although outwardly farmers still appeared to own their businesses, the Government was telling them what to grow, who they could sell it to, and at what cost, with farms being repossessed without notice if they failed to comply. The Nazi’s chief of food policy, a vile little man named Richard Walther Darre, spent much of the decade attempting to forcibly shift Germany towards an autarkic food system, growing more wheat and rye, scaling back animal agriculture, and attempting to reduce imports.
These policies were often a tough sell, as they led to reduced diet quality and diversity. German people were encouraged to eat less meat, less refined food and consume more locally grown produce such as rye bread. In an attempt to shift public attitudes, Darre repurposed the ideals of Blood and Soil, declaring that German people were intimately linked to the land of their birth, and would only thrive if fed food grown on German farms.
Blood and Soil leads to some dark places. Outsiders are seen as taking up valuable resources, depriving Germanic people the food of their homeland. Any itinerant ethnic groups are easily framed as being less than human. It becomes easy to make a population view the agricultural land of neighbouring nations as their rightful property. Hatred, expulsion, dehumanisation and even murder become an easier sell once you convince people of a mystical link to the soil of their birth.
It was partly through Blood and Soil that the Nazis justified war and genocide. When Darre’s attempts to create an autarkic German food system in the 1930s failed, expansion to the East became the only path to food sovereignty. It is even thought by some historians that the Final Solution was first posited by Darre as an attempt to free up agricultural resources.
Within German fascism, there was always a strange embrace of mysticism and spirituality. It is easy to think of the movement as technology and industry driven, but at an ideological level, it was far more focused on soil worship and the idolisation of rural life. The yeoman peasant was the embodiment of the ‘good’ German. Urban sprawl was an evil blight on a great land. Cities were considered dirty and unnatural, often a coded reference to Jewish people. Many of the oldest anti-Semitic laws were those that forbade Jewish people from owning farmland.
It would be easy for a certain type of food blogger to write a post today, talking about a spiritual connection to the soil, a distrust of urban living, the healing power of the countryside and how we should eat natural foods grown close to home. To many of us, these things feel liberal, progressive, and good. Combine that with some eulogising about organic agriculture, rejection of industrially produced food, decrying of long supply chains and a belief that natural is better, and we have exactly the sort of food writing popular in supposedly left leaning newspapers and magazines today. Yet this is the rhetoric of early Nazi food policy, and that of much European fascism in the 1930s. It is this, not a dismantling of the state, that signalled the beginning of fascist beliefs.
Anyone who knows me or my writing will understand that I sit far to the left of politics, believing in a high tax economy and liberal immigration policies. I have no time for the current UK Government and I hated Donald Trump with every ounce of my being. But it is possible to profoundly dislike someone politically and still not believe they are a Fascist. 1930s fascism was not about a small state and unrestricted trade. It was certainly not about free speech and low taxes, nor did it have anything to do with individualism and the death of big society. If you want to find modern movements ideologically linked to 30s Fascism, you are far better looking around farmers’ markets, organic organisations and food sovereignty advocates. The rhetoric of such places sounds benign, and no doubt can be. But it is also fertile ground from which hate has grown before.