Macrobiotic Musings: Reintroducing...Sea Vegetables!

A Spoonful of Sugar Help the Sea Vegetables Go Down

When I am hungry and want to get my feast on, sea vegeatables are absolutely the last thing I want to pop in my mouth to say hello to my stomach. I have never liked seaweed and don't know if I ever will. But as Mary Poppins likes to say, a spoonful of sugar will help the medicine go down--in this case, the medicine is sea vegetables. I am of course big into macrobiotics right now, and I was crestfallen to learn that I should be eating more seaweed and other vegetable denizens of the sea. But before we go running for the hills in terror as we usually want to do with things or people we don't understand, let's learn more about it. Seaweed has incredible properties, and it will do all of us a lot of good to take a second glance and learn more about seaweed and other sea vegetables (a core food in the macrobiotic diet.) Who knows, maybe we can even learn to appreciate these watery wonders like Pee-wee Herman learns to appreciate snakes (spoiler: he never does.)

The following information is from The Macrobiotic Way by Michio Kushi.

Sea Vegetables, a Brief History

(life.bio.sunysb.edu)

Sea vegetables (extracts of marine algae) are in just about every processed food we know of as they are used as stabilizers and thickeners, such as carrageenan, algin, or agar--all extracts from sea veggies. But we shouldn't eat them as additives. As with all food, we should eat straight from the source because that's where the truest, most dynamic energy comes from. As I have repeatedly said, this is why we must eat food that is alive as opposed to dead and processed. We are what we eat, and we shouldn't be eating dead food. Dead food is dead energy. Processed food isn't even dead. It's...alien. And aliens don't taste good. But I digress...

Sea vegetables may sound alien, but they are in fact one of the most commonly eaten foods around the world--just not here in the West. People all over the world have eaten sea vegetables for centuries. They were, and still are, as common as bread and butter, depending on geography. Who ate them, eats them? The Chinese, Irish, British, Icelanders, Canadians, Japanese (duh), Native Americans, Inuits, Hawaiians, Koreans, Russians, and even South Africans. The list goes on.

Dulse was sold by street vendors in Boston. In the maritime provinces (go Newfoundland!--when my wife went kayaking with Stan Cook over there by Tors Cove, ol' Stan there just reached into the water and ate some seaweed!) and Scotland, a dulse snack was (still is?) served in pubs. The Russians made a fermented beverage called sea cabbage. The coastal Irish have used Irish moss and other sea veggies in their recipes for centuries. The Japanese grade their sea veggies like the USDA does with their antibiotic-pumped, disease-infested and sickly factory-farmed meat (usually given a Grade A since they're paid by the industry, many regulators are actually from the industry, to stamp this approval. I give it all a triple grade F, which stands for Factory Farmed Feces, since really the whole system is fueled by shit anyways. Read Animal Factory by David Kirby to see what I mean.)

"Digression!"

"No it's not, this is all relevant! Shut up!"

"Sorry."

"That's okay, just let me kvetch if I want."

"Sure, it's your blog."

"Thank you."

Sea Veggies, Getting To Know You, Getting to Like You


Though they may sound as appealing as Green Eggs and Ham, Sea Veggies are massively good for us. Let's check the stats:

Kelp: 150x more iodine, 8x more magnesium than garden vegetables

Dulse: 30x richer in potassium than bananas, 200x the potency of beetroot for iron content

Nori: this is the stuff sushi is usually bundled in, has loads more vitamin A than carrots and has 2x the protein of some meats (not sure which, but our bodies don't really harness the full power of meat proteins because we are not carnivores, hence why we should get our proteins from plant foods and not animal foods.)

Hijiki: 14x more calcium than whole milk

Kombu: loads of phosphorus

Finally, sea veggies contain Vitamins A, B1, C, E and B12, very important for vegans and vegetarians (even meat-eaters don't get enough, actually.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power of sea veggies, not a surprise since the source of all life began in the sea. In fact, this is why everyone's always telling us to eat fish because it is rich in Omega 3's. Well the only reason they're so rich in Omega 3's is because they are eating marine algae--so, if you're feeling brave, go ahead and dive right in and explore the world of sea vegetables. Don't know where to begin? My mom just told me of a very interesting blog called Seaweed Snacks. Though they're not all vegetarian, many of the recipes look very delicious. You'll also want to check out any macrobiotic website and cookbook like The Macrobiotic Way or Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet. Macrobiotics Canada is a great place to order anything you can't get in your area.

Update: I just discovered that you can get a variety of sea veggies at Fat Nanny's over there on Duckworth Street so go get some!

Eat B(right) and deep,
Veggie Daddy

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.