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.

Corn, Soy, Sugar: The Holiest of Trinities

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

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