>Robert Proctor has a chapter in his fascinating book Racial Hygiene:
>Medicine Under the Nazis about the German obsession with natural
>foods and such during the 1920s. The rhetoric around how modern
>industrial techniques spoil the purity of food sounds uncannily
>familiar - and the links to the neo-primitivism familiar to any
>reader of Adorno are pretty interesting. That's not to say that an
>obsession with organic food leads straight to the death camps, but
>there is something about concerns with purity, closeness to nature,
>authenticity, organicity, and strength that should provoke some
>serious scrutiny.
That sounds a lot like psychology to me. What's Yoshie gonna say?
But seriously. We should scrutinize--and then, presumably, root out--to forestall the possibility of our society developing a symptom shown by the Nazis? Unless you have something else in mind, I don't see that as sufficient reason for alarm. The Nazis also obsessed over zero unemployment and state ownership--should we call Marxism/socialism into question too? There's also the question of exactly who or what we are to scrutinize. I'm having trouble picturing it without a form of the witch hunt, like we all stand outside of food coops and health-food stores, interrogating and inspecting the bags of all the dirtheads and granola-munchers. What do have in mind, Doug? (These are questions, not Carrol-style provocations.)
Eric