“Today we are in the middle of the problems that this book warned of when it first came out in 1996. The life forces of people, and especially of young people, are getting ever weaker. One can see this in the meteoric rise of conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, burnt-out syndrome, repeated infections that last a long time, increasing infertility and the weakening of the immune system. People are getting weaker and more prone to disease, not only physically, but also psychologically. Up to 20% of the patients in medical offices are suffering from depressive disorders―and the trend is rising. A general lack of orientation with respect to the meaning of life is spreading.
What can bring life and light to people again? Things that contain life and light. And this also has to do with food, which should be full of these forces.” ― Daphné von Boch, MD
Dr. Otto Wolff―known to English-language readers through his home remedies―offers a clear description of the foods we eat and what we should really look for in them.
Scientific investigation of nutrition has led to increasing industrialization of food production. Vast numbers of details are known, but industrial processing is causing the force of food to be progressively lost. This makes people feel unsure about which foods are still healthy today.
Otto Wolff’s aim is to enable consumers to form their own opinion about the food they eat. He takes guidance from the principle stated by Angelus Silesius: “The bread is not our food; what feeds us in bread is God’s eternal word, is spirit, and is life.”
Dr. Wolff shows that it is not the physical substances as such that feed us, but the force of life in our foods. The knowledge that life is transformed light has been completely lost in modern agriculture. However, viewing food as it is in biodynamic agriculture can help us gain true insight and understanding of food quality.
“Today people are brought up to think that plants ‘live’ on potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen just as animals live on plants. There is an error in this, however. Animals get their life from the life of plants. Life itself, however, is a force and bound to physical substance for only limited periods of time. Plants cannot take ‘life’ from substances like potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen because these are completely dead. Simple observation will show that light is the most important thing for plants. Light is also a force, just as life is.” ―Dr. Otto Wolff
This book is a translation from German of Was essen wir eigentlich? Praktische Gesichtspunkte zur Ernährung auf geisteswissenschaftlicher Grundlage (2nd ed., Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 2012).
Dr. Otto Wolff was born in 1921 in Glatz, Silesia (then a region in northeast Germany). He studied biochemistry and medicine and first worked as a hospital physician, then as a general physician and school doctor. Later he worked many years in the pharmaceutical industry in the development of new anthroposophic medicines. He wrote numerous publications on anthroposophic medicine, including the standard work: The Anthroposophic Approach to Medicine (three volumes). During his last twenty-five years he taught anthroposophic medicine to medical doctors worldwide. Dr. Wolff died in Arlesheim, Switzerland, in 2003.
