No aspect of today's university seems undisputed, which makes it all the more astonishing that the trail mix has so far not been criticized.

Criminal neglect, since all positions of current debates on education can be found in its contemporary forms, with a high metaphorical nutrient density.

Trail mix, once an expensive elite snack that was said to help with student hangovers, is now widely available in a variety of forms.

The name is nutritionally valid, because the raisin-nut mixture contains glucose, which is essential for brain function, on the one hand, and essential fatty acids, which are required as building blocks for brain cells, on the other.

The general availability of trail mix is ​​thus a unique neuron formation expansion.

But the social democratization of elite snacks goes even further.

German discounters offer a variant in which the usual composition has been stretched with plenty of peanuts to keep the price down.

Supporters of broader academization may recognize the idea of ​​an alma mater for everyone in this.

Adherents of a more exclusive university, on the other hand, would immediately notice that the substance was saved here: With the peanut, the truth falls by the wayside, because it is not a nut, just a legume.

Among those critics of the peanut are some extremists who seem long lost to education.

The university can no longer produce great minds because brilliant talents remain hidden in the darkness of the masses.

This category of critics finds confirmation in trail mix without dried grapes: cherry pickers looking for geniuses only find food for their pessimism here.

Diet tips from Friedrich Nietzsche

In addition to the fatalistic enemies of the peanut, there are the ambitious, forward-looking.

They find salvation in the view across the Atlantic, where they look enviously at the sweet fruits of the elite universities there.

They want Harvard, Princeton, Yale on the Rhine and Neckar, they appeal, they emigrate, but maybe for the moment they're satisfied with America's exported fruits and buy a trail mix with cranberries instead of raisins.

Finally, what remains are the conservative critics in the best sense of the word, who still see the good and preserve it.

For them there is still the trail mix in its classic composition.

They still exist, the good things.

Education is still possible at a German university.

But when they nibble, it also gnaws at them.

Didn't your father crack open a walnut with the help of a second one in your bare hand?

They look at their delicate academic hands from both sides, then turn a blanched almond between their fingers.

The core of the matter is identical, but where you used to work out the content yourself, today all nuts are cracked.

The question remains: How could such an astonishing finding, based on nothing more than the eternal platitude of “you are what you eat”, remain hidden for so long?

Nietzsche was already interested in the "question on which the 'salvation of mankind' depends more than on some theological curiosity: the question of nutrition".

The fact that he only took up this question so late in his work, namely in “Ecce Homo”, he attributes to the “complete worthlessness of our German education”, which “teaches us to lose sight of reality from the outset”.

In the nutrition tips that Nietzsche then recorded under the heading "Why I'm so clever", he does not mention any trail mix, neither good nor bad, but two points indicate that in his eyes it is not suitable as spiritual food.

On the one hand, Nietzsche saw himself as "an opponent of vegetarianism from experience, just like Richard Wagner, who converted me".

On the other hand, he took the same approach as the French: “no snacks”.