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.

Why Have We Declared War on Farm Animals?

I've finished reading Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet, and let me tell you, this girl is anything but clueless. She has this incredible way of summarizing every single reason why going vegan is the best thing for you to do and for the planet (and I don't even believe in global warming, but I do believe factory farmed food is doing lots of harm to it and our animals.) Unless you have the heart to slaughter your own cow, I don't think you should be eating one. And yet the U.S. slaughters more than 90,000 cows a day. 90,000 divided by 24 hours equals by the time you have finished that hamburger and washed it down with a coke, 3,750 cows were mercilessly murdered to appease our ceaseless, misdirected hunger.  By the time you take a few bites of hamburger in one minute, about 63 cows get hanged. As Jonathan Safran Foer says in Eating Animals, that's war. We have declared war on all cows, pigs, chickens, and fish everywhere.



They have no defense, no say, and for some reason cats and dogs are spared. Why don't we eat our dogs?  Foer and Silverstone challenge. (Actually, euthanized dogs and cats get converted into livestock feed. Didn't know that, did you? Those cats and dogs are being eaten by cows, so we are pretty much eating euthanized cats and dogs if you want to be technical about it.) So please, if you don't think you could kill the animals you eat yourself, then you probably shouldn't have any business eating them. Oh, but they're so healthy for you, our government proclaims. You gotta have meat and drink milk to be strong. That's hogwash, though, and it only takes a little digging to find out the truth. The establishment uses fear-mongering to make us worry about how much protein we're getting. We're all so obsessed about where our protein is going to come from. If you don't eat meat or dairy, then how can you get your protein? Well, as Silverstone brilliantly points out, the official term for the clinical disease of protein deficiency is called kwashiorkor. Never heard of it? That's because it's obviously not a danger. As The China Study clearly points out, what is a danger is the exact opposite: having too much protein in the system is what can kill us and does kill us daily. While my dad was visiting us here, he perused the book and was convinced. He was worried about having too-low of a cholesterol, but after reading The China Study he saw there was no reason to worry and that eating eggs and dairy was also a lose-lose proposition.



Forks Over Knives just came out in theaters and covers all of this as well. The evidence about the dangers of eating animal protein is irrefutable. Even if animal protein was good for you, declaring war on these animals is our modern-day, post-war tragedy. Don't think for one minute that an animal before slaughter does not feel any fear. And that very fear stays right there in the meat. Cortisol levels get jacked up just before slaughter, and then we eat them. It's scary meat. We are eating fear. There are much better things we can eat, many more kind foods out there. Please take the time to learn about them so you can make the right choice at the dinner table.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Becoming Food Conscious, It's Our Responsibility

When you start to become food conscious, more so than you used to be at any rate, you start to buy less processed food. It starts to slowly dawn on you that the packaged crap at the grocery stores they sell is not food at all, just "pretend" food, like the playdough food molds you made as a kid. Look, mom, I made a hamburger! you proudly show to your mother, holding a bright little purple and blue patty. In fact, if it weren't for the fancy, colorful packaging and the bright logos and pictures with the fantastically-recognized brand names and their associated mascots, we wouldn't have the faintest clue how to tell the food apart from each other. We would have no clue what it is.

Take this quiz to match the ingredients to the processed food and see how you do. What'd you get?

If you take the quiz, you should quickly notice that what we are told is food by the major food brands is clearly not food. Not even close. Not even the vegetarian Frankenfoods. We need the companies to come up with big fancy names to tell us what the food is or we would clearly have no idea. What's even funnier? Even when we are told the ingredients, we still have no idea what they are or where they come from. It has come down to the point where we need to hire a personal biochemist to tell us what's in the package, what we are putting into our bodies. It ain't food.




Nobody seems to know (or care.) Well, some of us care. The Italians have led the slow food movement since the 70's.  Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan and Food Inc. among many others have helped put our food concerns more on the map. NPR and Alternet.org have tons of articles on food. Veganism and macrobiotics have become the next cool thing, with Ellen Degeneres and Alicia Silverstone giving these movements some seriously-needed celebrity-endorsed "brand recognition" as well. With all the diseases, environmental catastrophes, alarming food-related deaths, healthcare crises, rising food prices--how can we not be paying attention? We'd have to have our heads deep in the sand to not be aware of the real danger that E. coli and antibiotic-resistant pathogens in our food pose to us. Many of us do, many of us don't.

Where do you stand? Are you buried down deep or are you coming up to the surface for some badly-needed air? Are you in denial or do you know what's up, you just "don't want to know." I get that one all the time: "Look, I don't want to know." Wherever we are, at some point the piper is going to get paid. For Americans, it's getting paid already:

#1 cause of death: Heart disease
#2 cause of death: Cancer
#3 cause of death: healthcare



Someone in the comment section of the Slate quiz above said they didn't care that there's synthetic chemicals in their food as long as they're not harmful to them. This is a perfect example of utter denial. The healthcare system is also supposed to be good for us in that they give us drugs to help us and heal us, and yet healthcare is the third highest cause of death in America. Still think the FDA and USDA-approved food industry isn't harmful to us? Think again. If the doctors and hospitals are killing us, what do you think our "safe" food industry is doing to us, which is largely ruled by giant non-regulated corporate behemoths? It ain't pretty, I can tell you that much.

Canada and the European Union are way more food conscious than America, in terms of regulations and bans on certain practices, but there is still a long way to go, and you should pretty much assume that Maple Leaf and Country Ribbon, just because they are Canadian, aren't all that safe, either. The Canadian Food Industry doesn't appear to be that regulated or "safe," and so until I hear otherwise, I'm going to lump Canadian food brands in with American ones and consider the entire food industry a North American epidemic that has actually become a global pandemic. President's Choice has tons of genetically-modified ingredients in their brand and they are not labelled. Remember the swine-flu scare? These pigs, though located in Mexico, belonged to the American company, Smithfield Foods, and Canadians everywhere got vaccinated for H1N1. It was a very real danger, so borders don't matter.

We must do our part, and no matter where we are in the sand, we must stop supporting the food industry giants as much as possible. It is our responsibility not just to protect ourselves but to help our neighbors, even if they do live across the world. For us Newfoundlanders, it's not an easy feat seeing as how 99.9% our food is imported. (At least we can eat somewhat locally during the summer months.) But if you live off The Rock, I'd love to hear your excuse.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy