He did not stand at the lectern. There was no lectern either. He stood next to the grand piano, as if the grand piano were his prop. And he said, without introduction, without polite preliminaries:
“Measure what matters.”
The English word stood in the room like a cold glass. It had something commanding about it, precisely because it was so smooth.
Zieser let the sentence take effect for a moment, as if it were an exercise: you endure it, then you keep breathing.
“Keep it simple,” he added, and now some guests smiled in relief, because they thought simplicity was a promise. They did not notice that in such systems simplicity is often only the form in which compulsion becomes pleasant.
He then spoke – and here the constructed persona revealed itself completely – not like an enthusiast, but like a man who is used to breaking things down into basic patterns. He spoke of “default”, of “pattern”, of “environment”; he spoke of the fact that people do not fail because of a lack of knowledge, but because of an everyday life that constantly offers them an “energy surplus”, packaged as comfort. He spoke of “ultraprocessed”, and one could hear how this word, which sounds like a technical defect, became a new category of evil in the minds of the guests.
Hans Castorp listened, and at the same time he listened to himself listening. For within him an old, bourgeois movement stirred: the hope that life, if only you arrange it correctly, will also become correct.
Zieser explained why one needs a “default optimum”: not because it is perfect for every person, but because in practice a person cannot constantly make new decisions without becoming tired. You need a basic pattern that wins out in everyday life, not in theory.
He said “species‑appropriate”, and he said it as if it were a scientific term, not a moral one. Yet he then explained it very pragmatically: energy, nutrient density, fiber, fat quality, minimal processing. He spoke of vegetables, of legumes, of fruit, whole grains, fish; he spoke of unsaturated fats. He spoke so concretely that the abstractions suddenly smelled of broccoli.
“Mediterranean whole‑food diet,” he said, “is the best‑studied default optimum.”
The word “Mediterranean” had something seductive in the alpine air. It was as if the south word that Gustav von A. once wrote on a sheet of paper had here been cast into a formula. The South as a nutrition plan: that was modern magic.
