8. Potatoes, Beetroots, Radishes and the Spiritual in Human Beings

In this chapter Rudolf Steiner examines the effect of potatoes, beetroots and radishes in the context of how the body uses food to regenerate itself. Contrary to a materialistic view that it is food which directly builds the body, nutrition only provides the stimulus which enables the human being to regenerate himself out of the spiritual sphere.

 

 

Now I would still like to speak about something else, because that was also contained in one of your questions. You might be aware that potatoes were introduced to Europe at a particular time. Europeans have not always eaten potatoes ...

If you look at the plant, it consists of roots, stem, leaves and blossom [a drawing is made]. It is a strange phenomenon in the plant: the root down there becomes very similar to the soil, containing many salts, and the blossom up there becomes very like the warm air. It is as if the warmth of the sun were continuously cooking the blossom. Hence the blossom contains oils and fats, oils in particular. So when we look at the plant, we have the salts below which are deposited. The root contains salts and the blossom contains oils.

Now the consequence of that is that when we eat roots we introduce many salts into our intestines. These salts find their way into the brain and stimulate the brain. And it is quite good if someone suffers from headache—not migraines but the kind of headache which fills the head—for them to eat roots. You can taste how there is a kind of salty sourness in roots. When you eat the blossom, the plant is actually already half cooked. There we have the oils, something which lubricates the stomach and intestines and affects the abdomen. Doctors must also take that into account when they prescribe tea. You will never produce a strong effect on the head when you make tea from the blossom, but if you boil the roots and have the sick person drink that, there will be a strong effect on the head. So you see that whereas we must move from the stomach to the head in human beings, from below upwards, we must go in the opposite direction in plants, from the blossom to the root. The root of the plant is connected with the head. If we take that into consideration, we will understand the key thing about the potato. For the potato has tubers; they are something which has not quite become root. So if you eat potatoes a lot you are primarily eating vegetables which have not quite become root. Hence if you restrict yourself to eating potatoes and eat too many of them, not enough substance goes to the head. It remains below in the digestive tract. So we have a situation that through eating potatoes people in Europe have neglected their head, their brain. You will only see this connection once you start to engage in spiritual science. We might say that from the time that potatoes have taken an increasingly important place in Europe as a food the human head has lost in abilities.

Potatoes mainly stimulate the tongue and throat. When we go down the potato plant, we don’t quite go as far as the root. The same happens in people; when we don’t quite go up to the head and remain at the tongue and throat, they are particularly stimulated by the potato and that is why potatoes are very tasty as a side dish for people because they stimulate what lies below the head and leave the head alone.

If you eat beetroot, you get a terrible longing to think a lot. That happens to people quite unconsciously. When you eat potatoes, you get a longing to eat again quite soon. Potatoes make you hungry again so soon because they do not quite go as far as the head. Beetroot satisfies your hunger so quickly because it goes to the head, the most important thing, and because it infuses it with activity if it goes properly into the head. People sometimes find having to think terribly unpleasant and that is why they sometimes prefer potatoes to beetroot because potatoes don’t stimulate them to think. They become lazy. Beetroot, by contrast, stimulates the thinking because it is a proper root, but it does so in a way which makes one want to think—but if one does not want to think, one won’t like beetroot. If you need a stimulus for thinking, you need to use the salty stimulation of radishes, for example. If someone is not very mobile in their head, he will benefit from that because the thoughts are stimulated if the food is supplemented by radishes.

So you can see this remarkable situation that radishes stimulate the thinking. You don’t even need to be very active in your thinking, strong thoughts will come when you eat radishes—such strong thoughts that they even produce powerful dreams. Anyone who eats many potatoes will not have powerful thoughts but dreams which will weigh him down. And so anyone who must constantly eat potatoes will actually always be tired and always want to sleep and dream. It is therefore of great significance in terms of cultural history what foods are provided for people.

You might say: but the situation is such that we live completely from matter! And yet that is not true. I have often told you that we human beings have a new body about every seven years. It is constantly renewing itself. What we had as matter in our body eight or ten years ago is no longer there. It has gone. We have cut it away with our nails, cut it off with the hair, it has gone as sweat. It has left. Some of it goes quite fast, some of it slowly, but it all goes.

You see, this is how these things are actually seen—let me draw a diagram: this is the human being. Now people are constantly shedding matter and are constantly taking in new matter. As a result, people think: matter enters through the mouth and leaves again through your rear and urine, people are rather like a tube. The matter is taken in through eating, it is kept for a while and ejected again. That is approximately how people see the human being.

But in fact nothing of earthly matter enters the real human being, nothing. That is a delusion. The situation is this, that when we eat potatoes, for example, then we are not assimilating something from the potato, but the potato is merely something that stimulates our jaw and throat and so on. That is where the potato acts. And then the strength arises in us to expel the potato again and while we are expelling it we receive from the etheric, not from solid matter, what builds us up in the course of seven years. We do not actually build ourselves up from earthly matter. We only eat what we eat to stimulate us. In reality we are built up by what is up above. So that the whole thing which people imagine, that food goes in and that food goes out again and that in between something is left inside is not true; it only provides the stimulus. A reciprocal force comes from the etheric sphere and we build up the whole of our body from that realm. Nothing of which we are made up is built from earthly matter. You see, if there is a movement followed by a counter-movement you must not confuse the counter-movement with the movement. You must not confuse the fact that we need food to keep us active in building up our body with the fact that we consume food.

Now it is the case that irregularities can occur. Because if we take in too much food, then the food remains in us for too long. Then we collect more matter than necessary in us, become portly, fat and so on. If we take in too little, we have too little stimulation and take too little of what we need from the spiritual world, from the etheric world.

It is something of great importance that we do not build ourselves up from the earth and its substances, but that we construct ourselves from that which is outside the earth. If it is the case that the whole body is renewed in seven years, the heart is also renewed. You no longer have in you the heart which you bore within you eight years ago but it has been renewed, renewed not from the substance of the earth but renewed from what surrounds the earth in the light. Your heart is compacted light! You have indeed compacted your heart from the sunlight. And what you consumed as food only stimulated you to compact the sunlight to such an extent. All your organs are constructed from the light-imbued environment and we eat and consume nourishment to provide the stimulus.

You see, the only thing which food gives us is something like an inner armchair. We feel ourselves, experience ourselves as an ego in ordinary life, because we have physical matter in us. We feel ourselves in the same way as when you feel the pressure when you sit down in an armchair. And so you feel your body which continuously presses on what you have built from the cosmos. When you sleep you don’t feel it, because you are outside yourself. You feel your body like a kind of recliner made for you, harder in some if they are bony, softer in others. It is like a kind of recliner on which the human being sits, and we do, after all, feel the difference between a soft bed and a wooden bench! Similarly human beings feel the difference between what is hard and soft within them. But that is not the real human being, the real human being is what sits in him.