ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Max Rubners activities as an urban progressive on the eve of the First World War. Rubners first articulated his project of rational nutrition and began to put his scientific capital to work to change the way the German state managed the nutritional needs of the masses, particularly the urban poor. Max Rubners analysis of nutritional irrationality was an iconoclastic reading of the changes that urbanization had brought to traditional food ways. The project of rational nutrition was primarily an urban project that combined pessimism about the costs of industrial progress with optimism about the power of science, especially physiology, to minimize these costs. The rational nutrition project belongs to the history of biopolitics. Rational nutrition project offers a useful corrective to the overemphasis scholars have put on the authoritarian tendencies of biopolitical practices in the twentieth century. Rubner expressed pessimism about the ability of his rational nutrition project to effect any rapid change in popular eating habits.