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.

Eating the Sun: The Power of Eating Warm Foods

(howstuffworks.com)

Ceres, goddess of agriculture, corn, the carrier of the cornucopia, mourns the loss of her daughter Proserpina six months out of the year, ever since Pluto made her a captive and companion for him in the underworld. However, every six months, Proserpina returns and Ceres opens her arms to welcome her back from the darkness. While Proserpina enjoys her stay with her mother, the sun comes out and everything begins to grow—this is the time to plant those seeds, pick grapes off the vine of Bacchus, drink wine, fornicate, marry and be merry. But we all know the growing season ends. As Pluto takes Ceres’s daughter back to his underworld kingdom once again, Ceres once again mourns the loss of her daughter, the sun departs and the world becomes cold, the ground becomes hard with frost. Nothing grows, the trees shed their leaves to survive the harsh winter to come. All the animals hibernate in caves and holes and subdivisions until Proserpina returns once again. And so it goes.

(reversespins.com)

Oh Proserpina, where are you? Here on the rock of Newfoundland, it’s been a cold summer. Ceres doesn’t seem ready to open her arms to welcome Proserpina back from her prolonged stay in Pluto's underworld. Pluto may no longer be a planet, but we still associate Pluto with being cold. (Funny then that Hell is supposed to be hot.) In other words, the sun hasn’t come out. Or if it has, it seems to be teasing us, playing hide and seek. Perhaps Ceres has lost hope this year. Perhaps Proserpina was too drunk and hungover from partying with Pluto’s minions and was knocked unconscious while playing pin the tail on Cerberus. Perhaps Ceres and Proserpina are not on speaking terms with each other—having a row, as they say. Whatever the reason may be, the sun isn’t out, thus we are not warm. And when we are not warm our bodies contract too much and we retreat back into ourselves and away from the world. So we have a few options. We can do the corn dance (which I and my past lives seemed to have forgotten) or we can bundle up. We can harness the power of warmth. We can think warm thoughts. We can eat warm foods.

Heat and warmth is a strange thing to be talking about in the summer. (We’re heading toward August now.) Usually in the summer, we talk about how to cool down, not warm up. I was at Second Cup the other day and saw their ad for their new summer drinks, you know, to cool down. But there was a dire warning attached to the sign: FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY. Tim Horton’s has their iced lemonade chillers or whatever they’re called. Though it looks on the outset like just another marketing ploy to spur demand in a short amount of time and boost sales, it’s actually a reminder to us that Proserpina is only here for a limited time. And the marketing boys over at Tim Horton’s and Second Cup may have miscalculated the demand for their new gimmick. Newfoundlanders probably aren’t buying too many of those cold drinks. And if they are, they shouldn’t be.

So what’s going on? We have the heat on, our thick comforters are back on the beds, the thermostat is on, we’re inside cuddled under a blanket trying to get WARM. It is not just that the sun is gone. It is actually cold. It can still be hot without any sun. But this summer, if that’s what you want to call it, the weather seems to be contracting us, when it should be expanding us. Our instinct in the summer, usually, is to drink iced tea and eat salads, pasta salads, potato salads, deli sandwiches, but in order to expand, we must do the opposite. Now we have to think soup, casseroles, chili, hot cereal, cobblers and crisps, pies. Comfort food. That’s why it’s called comfort food. And if you’re eating non-comfort food in this cold weather, then you may be extremely uncomfortable and wondering why. You’re just following your instincts, so who can blame you? Our instincts are telling us one thing, but our bodies are telling us another: “Hey you! I’m cold! Warm me up!”

Being from Southern California, where it’s pretty even-steven all year round at a nice, comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit/20 Celsius, I never understood the concept of eating seasonally; my wife partner, being from Toronto mostly, did. And she cooks accordingly. See, we didn’t have falling leaves where I grew up, or snow-capped driveways. Christmas was just another sunny day, no difference from the Fourth of July. You could eat fruit all year long. So my wife partner raised her eyebrows at me when I would request “summer foods” in the winter. She thought I was strange, and I thought she was strange for planning her recipes according to the seasons. Now I see the error of my ways. Boy do I ever!

Rudolf Steiner was big on warmth, he always emphasized it. Warmth is the beginning of everything, the source of all life. The first thing we do to a newborn baby is swaddle them up. If your children aren’t growing in a healthy way, it might be because they are too cold. Think about it. Without warmth and heat, without the sun, nothing would grow. We often underestimate the power of the sun’s energy, we take it for granted. This summer, if it isn’t going to come out, then we must summon it within ourselves. Food, real food, is stored energy. We eat the food so we can get the energy. This is why we eat more grains in the winter and more fruits and vegetables in the summer. If you eat lifeless food, however, then it stands to reason you will have a lifeless energy about you. Processed food, processed meats, processed veggie burgers, processed anything—it has very little energy, despite what the marketing boys over at headquarters will tell you. The new McDonald’s Happy Meals may serve apples, but you can bet those apples are heavily processed. Ever see an apple left out too long? It oxidizes and turns brown. I don’t even know if the McDonald's apples can even be called apples. God knows what they’re doing to them. I know their oatmeal isn't oatmeal.

Terry Walters, not just a cooking genius, but also a nutritionist, has one of the best cookbooks out there called Clean Food. Rather than eating Mr. Clean in our foods, she stresses that the foods we eat should be clean, non-processed, foods.

What makes the book so special is that the recipes are organized by season. So for any of you locavores out there, this is a special plus. If you eat locally, then you can be sure you are eating seasonally, across the entire food spectrum. This is one of those if-you-are-stranded-on-a-desert-island-and-could-only-take-one-cookbook-with-you kinds of books. It’s simply incredible.

 

Clean Start is amazing, too. All the recipes are gluten-free. Gluten seems to be the new enemy, people increasingly getting diagnosed (incorrectly?) with Celiac disease. Just another example of how unhappy our beloved Ceres has become as our relationship to Mother Earth has become increasingly twisted and strained. How can we cheer her up? 

Eat, drink, and be warm. Even if it is summer.

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

I would like to thank my good friend Lesley for inspiring this post.