Macrobiotics, Trend or Tradition?
Well, we have just eaten our first homemade macrobiotic dish: Purple Passion Stew from
The Macrobiotic Community Cookbook
which my wife found in the bargain bin at a bookstore. This book is like a compilation/greatest hits of all the best-known macrobiotic chefs in the field, a veritable who's who smorgasbord of philosophical cooking gurus, such as Jessica Porter, author of
The Hip Chick's Guide to Macrobiotics: A Philosophy for achieving a Radiant Mind and a Fabulous Body
, and
Christina Pirello. CP was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-six, began eating whole foods and cured herself of her disease. She has been championing
macrobiotics and whole foods ever since. I asked my mom if she knew what macrobiotics were. Apparently it's been around for years. So why I am I just hearing about it now???
Clean Food
and
The Kind Diet
are culprits.
What? You can reverse disease by changing what you eat? You don't say! Yes, from the little research I have done, this is clearly very possible to do. There are tons of stories out there of people who have either witnessed it for themselves or have seen it happen to others. The champions of this perspective first and foremost are the
PCRM, please get to know them and their books. We must dispel the myth right now: foods are and can be medicine, drugs are made in a lab, and most of the food we eat today is made in a lab. So our food is not food, but I guess we can go so far as to say they, too, are drugs, mutant-foods. Are we really so high and mighty that we think we can improve on God's design? Well, yes, regardless of the inevitably nasty consequences staring at me from the myopic surface of the eight-ball, we most certainly are. Survey says? WE'RE SCREWED.
FRANKENFOODS
Mary Shelley taught us of the dire consequences that can happen when we tamper with nature's original intentions, and my god are we tampering:
GMO's, monocultures, Monsanto's roundup-ready privately patented seeds, antibiotic-ridden vittles and victuals, FRANKEN-foods,
the destruction of our bees (no bees no food!), toxic waste run-off into our formerly-pristine rivers and oceans, Superman-speed topsoil erosion (it can take centuries for depleted topsoil to grow plants again, native vegetation wipe-out thus topsoil wipe-out, corn and soy in 99% of our food so that
our hair is now comprised of corn when tested in a lab, the conversion of euthanized cats and dogs into livestock feed which we then blithely eat at our favorite restaurant or in our deli-meat sandwich, the list goes on. Yes it's ugly now, but how ugly does it have to get before we go, "Oh shit, what are we doing?" History tells us, not long. Relatively-speaking, that is.
Are Peace and Suffering Inseparable?
Though our entire existence on this planet may be some massive aberration, perhaps some experiment created by the One where we've been somehow designed to worship some mystical being that is greater than us be it God or The Buddha, what is clear is that we are destroying/taking for granted our precious (semi-precious?) resources. We're stomping them into the ground so they can never grow for at least several more generations, literally. We're asking for severe punishment on a scale never before seen, meaning, on a global scale where we're all in cahoots with each other. In short, we are asking the grand master of creation to wipe us out. Scratch that, we are wiping ourselves out, cutting out the middle-man. We seem to want to. Look around you and ask if this isn't true. Look at the sheer waste. Look at the plastic. Look at your plate. Look at the drought in Texas, the flood in New England. Vermont, says CNN, has been wiped off the map. Are we so naive as to think it's not our doing??? We're staring at the problem daily, in real life and on T.V. Or is it a problem at all?
Ever since my own disease set in since the fall of 2008, I, too, have been on a journey of self-discovery. Under the moniker Circuit Tree, a little folktronica side project, I made
an RPM album about my suffering and how lost I was, such as in "
Happy Little Song" or "
Lost My Way." Those who suffer the most are the most likely to lean to the spiritual as they have, free marketly-speaking, a greater incentive to find truth in their pain--so Eckhart Tolle says, but I have found this to be true in my own experience. Those who suffer the most have the greatest potential to find peace in their suffering. If you're not suffering, then why would you be looking for peace? Where is your motivation? So one of the tricks of the self-help gurus, my favorite being Byron Katie, the strategy to deal with suffering is this: get into alignment with your suffering and your problems. Once you've done that, like the Earth's topsoil we are all rendering inert, so too will your problems disappear. See how easy it is? Ha ha ha!
Yes, this book changed my life, and I read it at
The MoMaVie Centre over at Quidi Vidi Lake. I was going there to cure my disease. One message: stop complaining! (Wait, am I complaining now? The food industry sucks. Ha ha ha!)
Biting the Hand That Feeds
Suffering or not, I'm motivated to
stop eating crap, plain and simple. I also seem to be motivated in showing others, not just that they're eating crap, but the crap that they are eating is a one-way ticket to the next food apocalypse. It's not so much a question of "if" as a question of "when." But it will happen: the rule says we are insane when we repeat the same actions expecting different results. Well here's a no-brainer: we're insane. Deeply insane. We're off our rockers. Somehow, someway, collective humanity seems to think (or not care?) that we can eat all this meat, grow all this grain so we can eat our meat, and enjoy an endless supply of fresh oil and water with which to grow all this grain and feed all our livestock, thus feeding ourselves in the process.
But as the authors of
Empires of Food
daringly posit, thousands of years ago, moving to agriculture and farming in which we maddeningly started to grow and eat plants that couldn't fend for themselves (grain, fruits, and vegetables) was one of the most fateful (read: stupid--but how could we know???) decisions mankind had ever made: we locked civilization to the land we inevitably, unknowingly, destroyed. In fact, all the great civilizations of the past unknowingly destroyed themselves in this very same way. And now we, too, are biting, in this case absolutely devastating, the hand that feeds us.
Put simply:
we have waged war on the food we grow, the land on which we grow the food, and the animals that eat the food that we grow on the land that we are destroying, a big lose-lose, a disastrous Bermuda Triangle from which we could never return, not in our lifetimes. That is insane. Sorry Stephen Covey, but we're not listening, even if you are a best-selling author. We are engaging in some massive, Jolly-Green-Giant-sized bad habits. The irony, of course, is that history has taught us to avoid all these moves, but as we are veering our gas-guzzling cars we love so much off the proverbial cliff, rather than ease on the brake, we are not just stepping on the gas individually but as an entire global populace! It's A Comedy of Errors of the greatest proportions! Sorry Mary Shelley but though your incredible book may be mandated reading in schools all over the world, it's falling on some seriously-deaf, illiterate ears. We just can't seem to learn your lesson of Adam Spurned. The modern food industry and all who eat of it, i.e. the global majority--we're all insane. But that's not a problem, of course. It's just who we are, who we have been as a people. We've done it for thousands of years, so why would we change now? When we start to die off in mass numbers with disease, starvation, and hunger on a scale we have never seen but just read about (the bubonic plague), we'll deal with it. The survivors will get smart, sure. But it will be too late. It will be centuries before we can recover. The fortune cookie says so. Once you've opened the plastic wrapper to see what's inside, that is.
Looking for Organic in All the Wrong Places
Walmart wanted to sell organic foodstuffs, but due to low demand, they had to scrap the let's-make-our-food-healthier-for-everyone campaign. The people voted and Walmart acted. Thou shall not buy organic at Walmart. (Walmart currently ranks as the #1 largest grocery chain in America.) The poor and the low middle-class like to shop at Walmart, statistically. And this demographic cannot afford organic food. So why in God's name would Walmart sell it? Well they don't. Not too many grocery stores do (at affordable prices, that is.) So where do we get it?
If you want organic at a decent price, you're going to have to cut the middle-man. Yes, I'm talking about your favorite grocery store. Grocery stores are glorified medieval merchants who want to give us a bargain and will cut their prices to do so. They cut prices to the bottom and we become bottom feeders. We are feeding at the bottom. And from the bottom pours out shit.
"Shit adds up at the bottom." -- Maynard Keenan, Tool. "If I let you, you would make me destroy myself..." Hmm, sound familiar? Thanks Rollins, you hit the nail on the head.
Georges Bataille has some great essays on this, too. Please please read
The Solar Anus, you'll laugh your sun-ified ass off. I had to read this one in the most amazing course I ever took, The Theory of Desire, taught by the best prof ever, Richard Corum at UCSB.
PCRM says to eat at the bottom of the food chain, but in this respect they don't mean to eat shit like us modern-day processed-food consuming bottom feeders, they mean eat food that grows close to the ground, close to our Earth. Just as we depend on today's middle-men, the grocery stores, we also depend on eating animals who get all their energy from eating plants. So again, let's cut the middle-man, in this case, middle-animals, and just eat the plants ourselves, rather than eating the animals who eat the plants. Let's just eat the plants! It is plants that give us energy, another no-brainer, and yet
there's all this debate about vegans and vegetarians and how they aren't getting enough nutrients. It's hogwash. This is what it means to eat from the bottom of the food chain. I'm not even an environmentalist and I can see the logic of why we should do this.
More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals. And this is the exact manner in which the great civilizations unknowingly destroyed themselves. Here's how it worked/works:
1. Clear cut the land of forests in order to grow food
2. Wipe out native vegetation which destroys the soil.
3. Topsoil erodes, washes downhill, massive flooding occurs, a new topsoil takes centuries to reform.
4. With no forests to attract moisture, clouds do not visit, massive drought occurs.
5. Land becomes inert (read: DEAD.)
6. People starve.
7. Disease and hunger kills off (input name of great civilization here.)
8. Wait for forests to grow again (takes 100's of years)
9. Repeat steps 1-8 for as long as necessary or until planet and/or human species is destroyed.
Texas has a drought now. The midwest had a big Dust Bowl thing happening. Rainforests are getting axed down to raise cattle. The East Coast just had a big flooding problem. The Middle East is mostly sand and desert. Soon South America will be desert, too. Fertile Crescent? Not fertile anymore, is it? Haven't even mentioned oil. We're stepping on the gas, yay! Let's drive off that cliff! Anyone with me? No? Look at your plate.
Corn, Soy, and Sugar, behold the awesome, the sublime, the Holiest of all Trinities. Not to mention the destruction of our people and our planet. Amen. Or Om, take your pick. It is what it is. Until it isn't.
Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy
