Macrobiotic Musings: Try the Squid Ink Blotter

Here's a macrobiotic juice I made this morning (inspired by The Juicing Bible) from carrots (see The Dirty Carrot), apples, and to give them this beautiful crimson color, beets! I also juiced the beet greens to give this leviathan even more depth. I call it the Squid Ink Blotter. Macrobiotically, these foods would be more on the yang side before juicing since carrots, beets and apples are hard, dense, compact, but once you juice them, you've pretty much squeezed the yang out of them. A bad joke, I know, but it's true! Fruit and vegetable juice is more yin as it is free and floaty, in liquid form, able to fill into any container regardless the shape. Before being juiced, good luck fitting a carrot or a beet into a shot glass.We bought all of the fruits and veggies at the Fagan's Farms truck at Churchill Square, and this is what makes this incredible drink macrobiotic: all of the ingredients are grown here locally, with little to no chemicals or pesticides.

This is one of the key criteria in the standard macrobiotic diet (SMD), that the majority of the food we eat should naturally grow in our climate and region. Our bodies don't do well when we eat too much food that ain't from around here. And there's a lot of that! For us here on the rock right now, that means lots of root vegetables, hard tree fruits, pumpkins, squash, etc. Basically, any of the fruits and veggies you see at the truck. But think twice before you grab for those potatoes!

Potatoes are unfortunately from the Nightshade Family, and though it'd be downright impossible to avoid them entirely, you might want to reconsider how much of these you're eating, especially if you're eating them in the form of french fries. Some people are sensitive to the alkaloids in nightshades which can cause arthritis and joint problems, and the SMD generally warns against them. Though I'm not going to stop eating them altogether, I do plan on being more careful from now on. I do actually suffer from some kind of tendonitis that isn't tendonitis (they're calling it overuse-syndrome, whatever that means)--but it's the main reason I started on the road to better health. And in order to do this, I first had to really change my perspective about food. I had to truly make the connection that the food we eat directly affects our health in a major way. Many people have actually reversed disease once they began to eat macrobiotically. I can easily see why.

Macrobiotics is not just a diet, but a lifestyle that allows you to live and eat in harmony with your local surroundings. It is hard for us to do this when we import most of our food across various oceans, boxed and packaged with God-knows-what additives and preservatives to do just that--add and preserve. When you eat foods that are local and close to the earth, there is no factory middle-man. Just true honest, good food that we were designed to eat. Nothing more, nothing less. It's the perfect balance, good for the planet, and good for us.

Love fish? In the SMD, eating fish is the only animal food that is considered AFE (acceptable for eating.) All other animal foods are extremely yang and can get you out of whack pretty fast. I imagine Newfoundlanders will be happy with such news. Just be careful you're food isn't so white all the time as has been my experience once I eat outside of St. John's.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

The Dirty Carrot

As I was cutting up veggies for juicing this morning, I tried to wash the dirt off all of the carrots, but this one was a very dirty carrot.

Macrobiotic Musings: Eating Dinner for Breakfast

Very recently I have converted myself into a macrobiotic eater, and since it seems to be so under the radar (which happens to be perfect for me as just about everything I like is generally under the radar) I thought I'd write a little macrobiotic diary, my adventures of going macrobiotic.

I started this blog in my frustration of there being no tempeh in stores here in St. John's, and since that time, my eating habits have vastly changed. Eating my wife's vegan cooking was a big change, as I've mentioned throughout this blog, then I went through a massive raw fruitarian phase which all but destroyed me. Finally, inevitably, my horrible experience with eating too much raw, tropical fruit from Costco led to my discovery of vegan macrobiotics via Terry Walters and Alicia Silverstone. And this change was quite the whammy on my food-borne curiosity. So much so that I now eat dinner for breakfast, aka leftovers from the night before, something I never thought I'd ever do in my lifetime.

Eating leftovers for breakfast, am I nuts? Yes, it sounded crazy to me, too, but now that I think about it, eating dinner for breakfast isn't that strange at all. We do it all the time, eating bacon, eggs, omelettes, sausage, breakfast burritos, Egg McMuffins (the last time I had a an Egg McMuffin I was in the shitter for an hour--back in 1996.) But if you're a vegan, you have to scratch all that. You're limited to the non-healthy items on the breakfast menu: pancakes, waffles, toast, muffins, cereal, pastry, bagels with fake cream cheese or even worse, processed soy sausage links or bacon strips with scrambled egg replacer (never had it, never will.) You're going down a bad road if you keep that up. Which is exactly what I was doing, I was eating from the unhealthy side of the vegan breakfast palette. But I needed to do the opposite: my breakfast needed to be as healthy as my other meals, not just comprised of a bunch of baked goods made from refined white and whole wheat flour that'll give me diabetes when I'm fifty. No thanks, I'll pass.

All of the these vegan-friendly breakfast items, pancakes, waffles, toast, muffins, conventional cereals, pastries, bagels--these should all be considered sometimes foods. More importantly, processed, refined white flour should also be considered a sometimes food, as everyone clearly can tell from the headlines is becoming increasingly bad news on the body. If you do use white flour in your baking, try to at least balance it out by halving the white flour amount and using whole wheat pastry flour for the rest in your recipes. So, yes, flour is pretty much a bad guy. No, it won't kill you, but it won't do you any favors either, and is more than likely to trip you up if you're eating lots of white flour and white sugar together in the perfect harmony known as the baked good. Don't want to give up bread? Then eat sprouted bread, it's much better for you.

What, now I can't eat baked goods? Then what the hell can vegans and vegetarians eat for breakfast? Ay, there's the rub. Fortunately, macrobiotics has the answer: you eat leftovers from the night before. Or you can go one better: just look at your pantry and throw a macrobiotic-friendly meal together. It doesn't matter if it looks like a typical breakfast or not. If you're going for hot cereal, it will. Anything else would probably look foreign--ironically stated because macrobiotics is all about eating in harmony with the climate and region you live in. Here's how the process works: you simply begin to think macrobiotically when you plan your meals, morning, noon, and night. Actually, when you start to eat macrobiotically, you begin to see how much sense it makes, and this is where the magic really happens: you feel it deep down, in the marrow of your bones, that you know what you're doing is the best thing you can possibly do. It feels just so damn good. Then you become a happy macrobiotic convert like us and the rest of the macrobiotic community.

No, it's not a religion, it's a philosophy/lifestyle, which just so happens to be based on Taoism--yin and yang. Our food is loaded with both, which is why it's so important to eat meals that balance both of the two energies. Eat too much yang food and you're yanged out. Eat too much yin food and you're...yinned-out. And with the mass populace eating loads of factory farmed meat (extreme yang) and coupling it with factory-made sweets (extreme yin), it's no wonder we're all bipolar, mood-swinging, disease-ridden, pill-popping, processed-food-a-holics. Chow down on some bacon, eggs, home-fries and pancakes with maple syrup and a cup o' joe or a glass of milk and you've yinned and yanged the hell out of your body right there. That's a hell of way to start a morning, and yet millions probably do this daily. But their day has just begun. Once you top it off with an animal-based lunch and dinner with a nice sweet dessert, and let's not forget all the snacks in between, and you're really out of whack, yinning and yanging all over the place, with no balanced center in sight, all of which is to be repeated the very next day, for years. Yikes! Doctor, I feel like shit, help me!

I made this the other night and so had it for breakfast this morning. I carmelized some leeks, carrots, and parsnips in olive oil, threw some fresh corn in there, and sauteed the whole thing in brown rice (soaked in water for at least three hours). I dabbed it with my wife's home-made cranberry relish from Thanksgiving, and voila, a perfectly-balanced macrobiotic breakfast. Everything in this meal is grown here locally, save for the brown rice and olive oil. It is the eating-vegetables-for-breakfast-thing that I am just getting used to, and loving it.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

To learn more, I highly recommend The Everything Guide to Macrobiotics and/or The Macrobiotic Way.

The F-Word Today's Health and Diet Gurus Can't Say

(Purple Passion Stew from Macrobiotic Community Cookbook)

Take a stroll down to the nutrition/diet section of your local bookstore, and you'll quickly deduce that no one seems to agree on what is good for us or what is healthy for us or what we should eat. The main division seems to lie in whether or not we should eat animal products, in other words, dairy, eggs, and red and white meat (and let's not forget fish, which J. S. Foer points out in Eating Animals is also farmed, even if it's wild.) Some self-professed health gurus think we should drink milk, eat eggs and eat meat, and others say we shouldn't eat them at all or have very little, about 10% of our daily intake.

It should be no mystery where I stand on this issue, but I cannot imagine any doctor or any nutritionist out there who could look you in the eye and say that eating today's commercially-sold, factory-farmed animal food would be good for you. I could understand if they were referring to local, wild game and insects like today's hunter-gatherers eat that you'll see on Beyond Survival, or past tribes and civilizations of yore, but not today's government-sanctioned and subsidized factory-farmed meat or dairy where antibiotics and all sorts of disease runs rampant, causing death and viral outbreaks such as H1N1 or Listeria. Honestly, who could possibly tell you that eating sick animals is healthy? (Oh, just cook it and it'll be fine! goes the typical and utterly ignorant response.) And yet, this is exactly what all these diet and health-related books are telling you to do or not do: eat lean meat and drink milk, the former for protein and essential fatty acids, and the latter, for calcium, all of which careful vegans can get in ample quantities.

What all of these books and knowledgeable authors are leaving out is that factory-farmed meat and dairy is absolutely NOT GOOD FOR YOU and they know it, but they simply CANNOT SAY IT. They'd be fired if they did, and they know that, too.


This all vastly depends on which lobbyists are paying their checks as we all know, or should know, since many of these doctor/scientists are paid off to slant the data in the food industry's favor. The China Study, though I agree it seems to be biased, is a great look into how these academic "experts" are paid by or invested in the modern food industry. Yes, the standby rule, follow the money, applies here greatly. Just see who pays their checks.

So this seems to be where all nutritionists part company, whether you should eat meat, fish, and drink dairy or not. But if they just wrote "Make sure you eat plenty of factory farmed meat, fish and dairy," it'd be a whole different ball game--one that none of these health experts are willing to play. They cannot go there, even if they want to. Factory farmed food is their triple F-word. It is simply unspeakable, it is the line they are not willing to cross. And for a second, let's imagine if they were to write this. Who would buy it? Who would believe anyone who told you to eat factory farmed meat and dairy? That's right. Nary a soul. We'd all see their bullshit for what it is. Which is exactly how we need to start viewing this entire health food and diet industry: it's all smoke and mirrors, and piles of factory-farmed pig cow and chicken shit--which just happens to keep them all so happily employed. It's also what seems to be in our food. But that's okay, just cook the shit out of it, and it should be fine.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy