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Abstract
Food consumption has always been a deeply symbolic, identity-related issue. But contrary to the intuitive assumption that links meat-free diets to peace-loving, left-leaning actors and ideologies, this article illustrates how a group of (German) neo-Nazis, Balaclava Küche (Balaclava Kitchen), appropriates vegan diet in its YouTube cooking videos. Analyzing these videos, supported by an interview with the group, the article inquires into the various ways in which cooking and food consumption are intertwined with their politics. It closes by putting the group’s attitude into a wider perspective, suggesting an ideal typical model of how links between culture, nature, and identity can be understood.
Acknowledgements
We are thankful for challenging but productive comments by three anonymous reviewers and Klaus Eder.
Notes
1. While we do not need to go into the details of Griffin’s stew, it is interesting to note that also in his case, cookery and politics are not neatly separated.
2. We are thankful to the members of Balaclava Küche for answering our questions in much detail. Whenever we quote from this interview, we indicate this through an “*”.
3. Tellingly, the leader of the Nazi-era Nazi Women’s League, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink (cited in: Wistrich Citation1995, 228), said in 1937: “even if our weapon is only the wooden spoon, its striking power shall be no less than other weapons.”
4. Although studies of the NPD have, to our knowledge, not focused on diet, early party programs already featured agriculture as an issue of autarky, and recent materials include extensive sections on, for example, the dangers of genetically modified organisms.
5. There is an interesting link between the postwar extreme right’s ideas and Hindu Aryanism, a link popularized by Savitri Devi, a “leading light of the international neo-Nazi underground from the 1960s onwards” (Goodrick-Clarke Citation1998, 6). Devi was a European convert to Hinduism who not only admired the Aryan myth but also National Socialism. Through the promotion of her ideas, extreme right positions, Eastern religion, Green ideas, vegetarianism, and biocentrism were connected, and able to influence the New Age movement. An article in the aforementioned Umwelt & Aktiv (Böthe Citation2010) celebrated Devi’s “radical environmental ethics” in a review of one of her books.
6. Although instruction in cooking started to be broadcast on TV almost at the beginning of the medium itself—in Britain, where one of the earliest such shows was broadcast, Phillip Harben already cooked on television between 1946 and 1951 (Collins Citation2010; Tominc Citation2015 for early Slovene shows in the context of socialism)—many commentators agree that the 1990s in particular saw significant change in how the instruction was communicated. In Germany, cooking shows have also become popular, featuring different types of personalities and cooking styles represented by chefs such as Horst Lichter and Alfons Schuhbecks, Christian Rach and Steffen Henssler, as well as Tim Mälzer and Ralf Zacherl.
7. For example, this is the case with regard to tofu, though not many know that the soybean has a National Socialist past, since the Nazis promoted soybeans in the 1930s to help make the country autarkic (Melzer Citation2003, 156f; according to Proctor [Citation1999, 4] soybeans were even called “Nazi beans”).
8. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that this historical figure serves as a motivation for their choice of diet, which is a suggestion that they ridiculed during the interview.
9. For reasons of space and of a lack of clear data, a discussion of the low occurrence of women in this video will be omitted. This does, however, not suggest that the modernizing extreme right views women as solely passive and responsible for reproduction.