Food quality is an important issue for our modern world. There is an increasing awareness that empty calories and mass-produced food don't offer the quality nutrition that people need, and that smaller amounts of better-quality food could help combat the epidemic of obesity sweeping the western world.

Karl König recognized the significance of human nutrition nearly one hundred years ago. In the 1920s he started lecturing on the subject as part of a program of social help in deprived city areas, and in 1936 gave a course for physicians and educators.

This book contains two essays and sixteen lectures ranging from the significance of nutrition in early childhood and during illness, and descriptions of the digestive process and the inner organs from a spiritual point of view, to his ideas about the future development of nourishment. König's work is introduced by three contemporary researchers into nutritional practice, and finishes with König's appreciation of the only mealtime grace given by Rudolf Steiner.