Macrobiotic Vegetarianism

[Big Wheel]

Jim Sangrey occasionally mentions that he adopted a "macrobiotic" diet for awhile an eon or two ago. I'm taking an anthro class on how food relates to various human cultures and I'm curious: what exactly did your diet include and proscribe, Jim? I've done some casual searching on the Internet about the topic but most of my results are just ads for online health food stores. Right now, I'm reading the anthropolgist Marvin Harris's Good to Eat, which has a brief mention of "the followers of 'macrobiotics' leader George Ohsawa, who aim to exist on nothing but brown rice, soy sauce, and herbal teas..." Did you follow Ohsawa's diet or does the macrobiotics movement have a number of different schools?

Edited March 12, 2003 by Big Wheel

[JSngry]

Right now, I'm reading the anthropolgist Marvin Harris's Good to Eat, which has a brief mention of "the followers of 'macrobiotics' leader George Ohsawa, who aim to exist on nothing but brown rice, soy sauce, and herbal teas..." Did you follow Ohsawa's diet or does the macrobiotics movement have a number of different schools?

Did I follow Ohsawa's diet? HELL NO!

And I'm not sure that that is an accurate description of it, either. But I never got into him too much anyway. Instead, I really, REALLY dug a thing by Michio Kushi called "The Book of Macrobiotics". That book makes a lot of sense in terms of it's basic principals, at least I think it does.

Pretty much, what it all comes down to is recognizoing that all life, including food, has opposites that make up the whole: sweet-sour, hot-cold, ying-yang, etc. The ideal in diet is to eat WHOLE foods that are indiginous to your general geographic zone, and to avoid processed food, additives of any kind, or foods that could not be consumed in whole form some how. Flesh was verboten, although a little fish/seafood could be allowed since it was of the water and not of the earth, but only if REALLY needed.

Staples ARE brown rice, miso (NOT soy sauce!), tamari (which IS soy sauce), tofu, and lots, LOTS of vegatables. Fruits had their place, but it was mostly grains and vegatables. No meat, no dairy. After you detoxed your system (and believe me, we can ALL stand some of that!) and lose your appetite for all the crap we all eat (look at an ingredients list and tell me that THAT is what our body functions most efficiently on!), the macrobiotic diet offers a wide variety of recipies that might use a lot of the same ingredients, but all taste different due to a little twek here and there. Your tastebuds return to their natural state, and food tastes like FOOD again! By the same token, crap tastes like crap, and the few times I lapsed, I was shocked at how funky all that fast food tasted, and how cooked meat really tasted like what it was - charred flesh. Yuck.

But I lapsed, and I remain lapsed. so who am I to talk. I've not kept up with macrobiotics in over 20 years now, so I don't know what's up w/Kushi or if there are other schools. I suspect the whole altrnative medicine thing might attract some new followers/ideas, but it's really not a "system", at least not as I practiced it. It's a general philosophy about the nature of existence, and the diet is just an application of that philosophy. The whole Feng Shui (before it became so damn "fashionable") trip has a lot of macrobiotic-esqe concepts to it.

Look for "The Book of Macrobiotics" by Kushi, and check it out. If your prof doesn't know about it, he/she should. Kushi had a LOT higher profile in America than Ohsawa did, and that book was kinda like the macrobiotic Bible for a while.

Hope this helps!

[John L]

Interesting. One of the reasons why I never tried that route (other than the fact that I love the taste of lightly-cooked and seasoned fresh animals) is that, once you give up meat and dairy, you have to pay a lot of attention to what you eat in order to ensure consumption of the proper complex proteins. Too much trouble.

Yes, most fast food tastes like junk.

But I hear that down there in Texas you can even breathe the smoke from those slow-cooking baby back ribs. Mmmmmmmmm

[JSngry]

Mmmmmmmmm indeed! Why do you think I'm still lapsed?

The protein issue is really no biigie though. Beans and rice combined give you your total protien, and there's a variant of that w/every meal. Got any idea of haw many different types of beans/peas there are? It's vast, I tell you, VAST! Throw in the miso and the tofu, and you got got more protein than you can shake a slab of slow-cooking baby back ribs at!

[John L]

I thought that it was more complicated in that the body needs various types of complex proteins, all of which are in meat and dairy. A certain type of bean with rice might give you one of them, but then you would need to make sure and mix it up with some different kinds of beans or peas or whatever to get the other complex proteins on different days. Then there is the one vitamin (Is it B12?) that you can't get outside of meat and dairy, and therefore need to swallow as a pill or inject with a needle...

Maybe this is all an exaggeration. I tried to read up on this shit once and got scared. The book was written to convince you to become one of them. It had the opposite effect on me.

I'll stick to my baby backs, even if it means an earlier grave.

Edited March 14, 2003 by John L