As one attempts to decipher one of the most provocative thinkers of the 19th century, one is asked to consider the loathing liberation that we’re condemned to form our own values to live life, now that we’ve god’s blood on our hands. The reader of Ecce Homo is urged by Nietzsche to consider the scientific question of nutrition and dietetics as a virtue of fine arts and of the poetics. He refers to the ‘causistry of selfishness’, as the care for the self which relates to the art of nutrition, recreation, knowledge and well-being. In the book of The Gay Science, he explains how we must be the poets of our lives and how the everyday matters. To Nietzsche, the pursuit of the question of nutrition, is the most crucial aspect leading to the ‘salvation of humanity’, and how you out of everyone must eat to gain their maximum strength, in the renaissance style, of moraline-free virtue. Nietzsche’s evaluation renders dietetics as the art of living, a philosophy of existence with practical efforts, the alchemy of efficacy if one may.

“God is dead, and god remains dead. We have killed him. What was the holiest and the mightiest of all the world, has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe the blood off us? What sacred games shall we invent? What water there is for us to cleanse ourselves of this hideous crime?” These words echo the brutal death of everything that humanity looked up to. While Nietzsche’s existentialistic evaluations lead him to condemn and reject everything that the religious institution of the Christian church stood for, he optimistically turns to the question of dietetics as a means of practical atheism. In the Gay Science, Nietzsche urges his ‘philosophical labourers’ to reconsider their domains of investigation. ‘Most of our existence today, still lacks history.’ Nietzsche points to his readers. He demands an explanation for the psychophysiological concepts behind love, envy, piety, the law and punishment, the way we divide our days and the logic behind the timetable. The experiences and moral climates of communal living, and the question of nutrition and gastronomy. Nietzsche argues the need for a ‘philosophy of nutrition’ and condemns humanity for the lack of one. (The noisy agitation for and against vegetarianism for instance, clearly indicates a lack of one even today.)

For the follower of Dionysus, nutrition for him meant familiarizing the body with elements of lightness and finesse, ‘that which invite the body to dance’, he joyfully mentions. Dionysism is a powerful alchemy with which, man no longer remains an artist, but a work of art. Dietetics for Nietzsche, has to do with the metaphysics as a residue of the flesh.

‘To choose one’s diet is to plan one’s essence’ Nietzsche believes in the existence of a relationship between one’s physiology and their ideas. Nietzsche explains how it is one’s choice to accept the necessity of dietetics, but one must first discover. Food, he says, in not an act of free will, but one of discovering what works in harmony with one’s physiology. The wise man’s search for harmonious nutrition therefore yields a successful fruition, after ‘he becomes what he is’, an idea that one may need to linger upon to comprehend.

Nietzsche proposes an amusing despair and disgust towards vegetarianism. He says, one who needs a (fortifying) diet, whose strength is diminished and deteriorated by vegetables, just as other individuals are, by those vices which are bad for them. The patron of fine food, mentions in a letter to a friend how after substantial experience in thinking about the idea, he’s realized how intellectually productive and emotionally intense beings must consume meat. The other kind of life he says, is suitable for the bakers and the bumpkins, the prejudice probably arising from his disgust towards bread in the meal, which does nothing but expunges the pleasures and delights of the individual preparations in the spread. Nietzsche’s endeavour towards discovering his harmony of dietetics and his psychophysiological state, led him to get as close to the diet of the primitive man as possible. He would indulge in simple charcuterie all through his life, with an affinity for the sausages his mother used to send him, which hung from the ropes off the walls of his house in the Alps. Imagine Nietzsche drafting ‘The Anti-Christ’ under these hanging sausages. However, he did agree on the exclusion of meat periodically from one’s diet, but quoting Goethe, he questions, ‘Why make a religion out of it?’

One of the most amusing revelations of Nietzsche’s on vegetarianism, was where he explains how, a man who is ‘ripe’ enough to be a vegetarian is also ripe enough for the ‘socialist stew’. His explanation could be understood in terms of these equations where he felt meat=strength=cruelty and vegetables=weakness=kindness, which clearly create the distinction between the weak and the strong, the aristocrats and the labourers, and the democrats and socialists.

Nietzsche’s understanding of nutrition as a way to evolve into a well-defined species and as a means of selection, brings about an interesting perspective on the role food plays between the evolution of man into a well-balanced, philosophical, sociological and a knowledgeable species.