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I am applying for an NEH fellowship to complete my second book, Natural: A German History. This book presents a cultural and political history of the German quest to eat naturally from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. During these years, ever more Germans turned to vegetarianism, low-meat diets, macrobiotics, early forms of organic farming, and other such practices in an effort to put the nation, as one early advocate phrased it, on "the way to paradise" (Zimmermann 1843). Whereas previous scholars have cast such developments as apolitical and even marginal aspects of German history, my book examines them instead as integral to the biopolitics of German modernity. It does so by showing how advocates for a more natural diet shaped wide-ranging efforts to create a more stable, self sufficient, and powerful nation able to thrive in the modern world.