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Macrobiotic

Trevor: Hello everyone this is Trevor Justice with the Vegetarian Health institute. Tonight’s call is on macrobiotic and our guess expert is Meredith McCarty, Author of the book “Sweet and Natural.” How are you doing Meredith?

Meredith: I am doing just great Trevor, thanks for having me.

Trevor: Yes you’re welcome. So as you know, tonight’s topic is Macrobiotic Diet or Macrobiotic cuisine and if anyone is listening right now and has a question, please go ahead and type your question into the box on the bottom of the webpage that you were emailed earlier. Since we don’t have questions yet Meredith why don’t you just kind of give us a summary of why do people need a macrobiotic cuisine and what are the benefits?

Meredith: Okay. Well macrobiotics has kind of a long history. The word itself, macro-bios means large view of life so it’s always been about trying to live our life in harmony with what was called by the original oriental teachers the order of the universe, the order of the infinite universe. So the word macro-bios, large view of life is living you life the way that it is the kindest and the gentlest to the environment and to our bodies as well. So it’s very ecological and very economical. It’s kind of the forerunner of California cuisine in terms of the principles of macrobiotics have always been locally grown food, plant foods, organic as much as possible. So it’s very ecological and it’s been that way ever since it first started, which was about late 1800’s.

Trevor: Well what are the differences between just a vegan diet and a macrobiotic diet? Aren’t there some specific differences in terms of using more seaweeds and…

Meredith: Yes, that’s true. The macrobiotic diet is based on and grains with smaller amounts of beans and soy foods, smaller amounts of nuts and and small amounts of animal foods if people really want that, that’s kind of how it’s always been. And since in the many years that it’s been around since the late 1800’s, it’s gone through a lot of different metamorphosis and a lot of people in macrobiotics are vegan but the things that distinguishes macrobiotic is the idea of proportion and balance. The Yin and Yang, that always came forward from the study of acid and alkaline actually and I can go into more of that later. The history is

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Macrobiotic Diet pretty interesting and it’s only a few paragraphs long so I can summarize it. But the foods that are focused on – it’s a slightly and that’s why plant foods are preferred and the original teachers were Japanese. They of course were surrounded by seas and that’s why they have fish in their diets just like the Okinawa’s did, who were the most studied long-lived culture on this planet. [Inaudible 00:03:36] it was a very small amount as with the healthiest cultures in China and elsewhere, very small amounts. So since that time, people in our country and particularly in Europe and macrobiotics is all over the world, its kind of end and slowed in its popularity but it’s still everywhere. I mean I talk to people in different parts of the world through email a lot and always hear about the macrobiotic conferences and things like that. So at this time, I’d say what really distinguishes it is the idea of proportion balance that the foods that grow most easily on the planet and have always been eating by the longest-lived people on the planet are the ones that were meant to eat because they are most available and least expensive and are good for the planet as well. They put minerals into the planet as they’re grown and rotated and that sort of thing.

Trevor: Okay well a lot of things you’re saying are also true for many vegans who are not macrobiotic and that’s why I’m – so I understand it’s possible that a macrobiotic could include some animal foods such as fish but for macrobiotic people like yourself who don’t include animal foods, what I’m trying to help listeners understand is how is this different than a vegan diet because so far most of what you’ve said, whole grains and with vegetables, I mean it sounds like a vegan diet. So what differentiates this?

Meredith: The main different is the proportion and balance aspect of it. A lot of vegans really don’t know that vegetables and grains are really the most important foods to be eating and the most predominant and many vegans are very much into processed food. So it can get kind of twisted by our modern society because everybody wants to buy things in packages that are quick and easy to prepare that the idea of the simplicity of really what grows and in what proportion and balance to eat it is one of the main focuses of macrobiotics. That those two food groups, the vegetables, and the grains are the most important followed by lesser of beans and lesser nuts and seeds and as well. Some vegans feel that is just as important as vegetables when actually they’re so different, really different and that vegetables are really more important for

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Macrobiotic Diet human health than our fruits, although fruits are fantastic foods but they do have a lot of sugar so they wouldn’t be as important as the grains and the vegetables. So that’s one thing and then you could also add in about the healing foods that are involved in macrobiotics. Macrobiotics has always been seen as a healing diet and those would be the foods that would contribute to that in particular that are particular to macrobiotics but are used by many people in natural foods world now and that’s foods like miso, good quality soy sauce and tamari, wheat-free soy sauce umeboshi plum and paste and vinegar, umeboshi vinegar as well and also ume plum concentrate and seaweeds, a whole genre of vegetables that really were introduced from the natural foods world through macrobiotics because the original features are Japanese and they always ate those foods. And it’s interesting because the teachers that I had in the early 70s, they were sent over to the US and to Europe from Japan by their teacher Jojo Osawa and when they came over here, it was about world peace. They were promoting good diet for world peace and then when they got here they saw that people were pretty sick by their judgment and they decided that instead of teaching about word peace, they were going to teach how to eat, so that’s how the whole thing started. It started as a world peace movement and kind of morphed into this thing that is the macrobiotic diet and that’s been taught ever since because it got recognition as actually helping people to reverse disease and so that – Dr. Satalero, he was President of [Inaudible 0:07:54] Methodist Hospital in the 70s and he reversed his . I believe he had prostate cancer that had metastasized to the bones and within one year of doing macrobiotics at a study house, you know a place where people are living and cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner he would go over there, he actually reversed the cancer and was cancer free. So that’s what got everybody’s attention back in the 70s and then all of a sudden it became the cancer diet which is not how it started as it all but that’s what happened there.

Trevor: Now that makes me think of – Oh let me just pause for a moment because according to the tele-seminar website, there are lots of people in the call now but nobody has asked a question yet. So if you’re listening and you have a question, just go to the website that we emailed you earlier today and at the bottom in the middle of the page there’s a box where you can type your question and hit submit. Now what you just said made me think of the optimal health institute. I think that’s what it’s called in San Diego where a lot of people have gone who had cancer and then but the time they leave they’re in remission and they only serve raw food.

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Macrobiotic Diet

So obviously a raw food diet is very different than macrobiotic but what’s the commonality, is it the fact that we’re talking about all whole foods that are predominantly vegan in both cases?

Meredith: That’s what I believe it is and macrobiotic does include raw food. I mean people have salads and pressed salads, raw salads, pickles and so it’s definitely got raw foods in there. I would say nowadays, more macrobiotic people are eating more raw food but it’s always had some raw food in there. So it’s never said not to eat it at all unless the person was extremely weak and cold and in that case, they would say to start with more warming foods according to oriental medicine which also has gotten involved in macrobiotics as well. So optimal health institute is a fantastic place and I know people that do macrobiotics and go to the optimal health institute and include sprouts and juicing in their macrobiotic practice, it’s just a really smart thing to do and tastes great and it’s really wonderful.

Trevor: Right so yes I just want listeners to recognize that the commonalities here between the two are number one, no process or packaged foods, right. It’s all whole foods and number two, well the raw foods diet is traditionally vegan and most macrobiotic people in restaurants I know are vegan too although I understand that there might be some macrobiotic people that include fish. So tell us about…

Meredith: Some people include little bits of everything. It will be small whatever it is. Some people – you never know what to expect when you first meet a person exactly how they translate it but the way we’re talking about it is the way that I know most of my friends and acquaintances practice it.

Trevor: Sure. Well actually since that topic has come up, let me ask you. You mentioned earlier that Yin and Yang in a way represent acid and alkaline, which our students all know about from lesson two on maintaining a healthy pH balance. Now pretty much all animal is on the acid side of the pH chart so I guess I just want to know more about the Yin and Yang concept and the acid and alkaline in macrobiotic cuisine.

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Macrobiotic Diet

Meredith: Okay. Well I’m going to be sharing some of what I – I gave a lecture on low acid eating, maintaining a healthy pH balance and so I’m just going to give a little history that I got out of my notes because sometimes I forget the dates and stuff so I’ve got it right here. So there is this Japanese army doctor and his name was Zagan Ishizuka and he concluded after 28 year of his medical experience that there were two alkaline elements in our body fluids that served important functions for health and those two elements he concluded were potassium and sodium and he was born in 1851 when Terry arrived in Japan and he was really smart, he spoke five languages by the age of 15, he could understand both chemistry and medicine and he concluded that foods are the highest medicine. He established science of what he called foods for health and happiness. It was called shokuyo in Japanese which meant right knowledge and proper deeds concerning creation and nourishment of the perfectly healthy person and he used only diet to treat people as a medical doctor back in the late 1800s. And people all over Japan addressed letter to him and they were delivered to Tokyo, Dr, Anti doctor. So it’s a very interesting story about this man who was way back then was only using diet to heal people. And one of his students, George Ozawa cured himself of his problems with issues of this diet and he developed the theory further calling it the “Macrobiotic Diet” and he applied oriental philosophy to the potassium and sodium concept calling them Yin and Yang. And that’s the most popular concept in oriental thoughts, the yin and yang part of it. And the idea is just that all foods balance each other if you can combine them properly but we need basically more alkaline than acid and that we needed to chew thoroughly, he always recommended 100 to 200 times per mouthful. I find that if can get to 30 I’m a saint I feel like but just even being aware of that is something. He always suggested that because the acid grains become alkaline by mixing them with the alkaline salivary enzyme called ptyalin and also good quality salt, real salt not salt that’s been refined also makes mild acid foods, especially plant foods such as grains and beans become slightly more alkaline.

Trevor: Really? Okay.

Meredith: That’s just the way he always taught it, yes.

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Macrobiotic Diet

Trevor: Well you know it’s interesting. The first thing that you told me about chewing 100 times totally Dr. Klapper and this man agree on that one for sure. Dr. Klapper’s made a big point about the importance of chewing but on one of our calls, he said that in his opinion even the highest quality, Himalayan sea salt that the traced minerals in it were very small compared to the sodium which is still in there just like any salt so he was really urging people to minimize salt.

Meredith: I know he does do that. I really think salt is important because of the minerals that are there and that’s just my conclusion after these years because really there is sodium in there of course but there’s so many more minerals than the ones that have a higher mineral content and if you get the ones with a low mineral content, you’re just not getting that variety at all and [crosstalk] so it does make a difference.

Trevor: Sure. I mean I have Himalayan sea salt at home and obviously if I use salt, I’m going to use that one. Okay so keep going on that.

Meredith: Well, all I can say is that – so that’s always been why if you look at the Yin and Yang charts of food, you’ll see whole grains in the middle and then you’ll see vegetables going towards the Yin side and root vegetables are considered to be more Yang, condensed, contracted than are green leafy vegetables which are more watery, slightly sweeter, not sweeter, more liquidity and above the ground instead of in the ground so they’re less contracted. They’re more expansive and the idea of getting Yang of food, I really found it really helpful ever since the first time – I met two guys who were macrobiotic in a barn in New Hampshire and that’s how I started my interest in the topic and I was not feeling well at that time. I was pretty sick. I had a terrible lifestyle in my 20s and when I saw that Yin and Yang chart, it was just really fascinating to think that you could actually set yourself up for cravings by what you ate from to meal based on this Yin and Yang chart. And at that time if you’re just eating which I know none of the listeners are but if you’re just eating like hamburgers or some sort of meat whether it’s eggs at breakfast or bacon and eggs for breakfast or hamburger for lunch, by the time you reach dinner time, you’re going to be absolutely craving alcohol and desserts because there’s no balance there. It’s an extreme balance of Yin and Yang, the contracting and expansion of different types of

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Macrobiotic meat balancing sweet and the only thing that will really heal that condition is eating in the middle the grains, beans and vegetables, nuts, seeds and fruits. So that was how it was taught with Yin and Yang and it was just so interesting to even watch yourself and we were always given assignments after you take a class in Boston in the early 70s, you’d always be given assignments to just watch and write down everything you ate during the day and just be mindless about what you’re eating, just eat whatever you’re attracted to because that’s usually how a lot of us start. And then notice how we are on this big wide swing that it can make you emotionally distraught, it’s just – it’s a dangerous balance the meat and sweet thing.

Trevor: Yes, sure. Okay so actually we have one question that has come in. Let’s go ahead and ask that, it’s from Asa and she said “Is tea an important intake in this diet? I can see that it includes Bancha tea and Twig tea in the article on our website, is it good to drink any kind of tea or just specific ones?”

Meredith: Those two teas are recommended in macrobiotic diet because they’re the least acid of the teas particularly the twig tea because the twig of the tea bush and of course all teas except for herb teas come from that tea bush. The twigs are really peasant tea and in macrobiotics that’s the one that’s recommend the highest because there’s more minerals and less tannic acid in twig teas than there is other kinds of tea.

Trevor: Okay good, perfect.

Meredith: So if you want a tea, that’s what – you don’t have to drink tea but that’s a beverage and you can imagine it became popular because of course the original tea is just for Japanese so we were given these foods that we’ve never even see before and now they’ve become available in all the health food stores and natural food stores.

Trevor: Now I also wanted to ask you when you talked about some of the healing foods, the first two on the list were miso and tamari and I was wondering if you were going to say tempeh in there because I was wondering if it’s fermented soy foods in general that are healing.

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Meredith: Yes. Tempeh wasn’t eaten in Japan, that’s really an Indonesian protein food. So tempeh became popular about ten years into macrobiotics and that’s when William Shurtleff and his wife as we talked about on the fermented soy food show, traveled around Asian and learned about tempeh as a fermented soy food and all of a sudden that became popular and I remember the macrobiotic cooking classes immediately embraced tempeh. It wasn’t anything that they had grown up with as teachers but the students introduced it to the teachers and the teachers started cooking it in their cooking classes and we started eating it and preparing it in different ways and singing the praises of it because it was fermented soy food.

Trevor: Okay so what is it about fermented soy or fermenting soy that makes it a healing food?

Meredith: Well soy you know is the protein food, the vegetarian protein food that is the highest in protein.

Trevor: It’s a complete protein. It has all the essential amino acids correct?

Meredith: Right and so it’s considered to be a really wonderful food but for some people, for many people, it’s very hard to digest. So people have over the years, people have fermented it because fermentation breaks down protein into its parts. It also makes minerals more digestible and breaks carbohydrates down into more assimilable forms and just fermented food is just pretty fantastic for being digestible and of course if you can digest something, then you’re really going to get the essence of it.

Trevor: It will help you absorb it.

Meredith: Yes exactly.

Trevor: Right. Okay Good. Dr. Klapper always said it’s not what you eat. It’s what you absorb that counts.

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Meredith: Yes.

Trevor: Okay good. Now what about umeboshi plum products like vinegar and the paste? Why don’t you tell us about that because that’s an obscure product that a lot of people may not be familiar with?

Meredith: Yes that’s a lesser known product to be sure and I wish that they had caught on in our agriculture in this country the way these others foods have caught on. I mean we have American misos now, students of macrobiotic went to Japan and studied how to make organic misos and that’s whose making a couple of the miso companies these days and they’re just excellent products. I wish we had done more with umeboshi. I just got some organic umeboshi raised in California here at the summer camp that I just came from last night. Last week was the macrobiotic, the annual 41 st annual macrobiotic summer camp in Lake Tahoe National Forrest and this one lady, she’s getting very old now grows American umeboshi plums. So when you go to whole foods and you buy them, they’re always in the macro section and you’ll see these little pink plums in a plastic container, sometimes they’re in glass container in some natural food stores such as the Good Earth up in Fairfax and I think also Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and across the country in different places. The umeboshi plum is a pickled salted plum and it’s not even a plum. I don’t know why the keep calling it a plum. It’s an apricot and it’s fermented for a long time with salt. They’re picked green and they look kind of like an army green color when they’re picked and they just put it in a container with salt and something called a shiso leaf and that’s this red leaf that looks like a mint leaf and it’s also called the beef steak leaf because it’s so red and they just put that in there because it adds I believe citric acid and something called picric acid. All of this is written. I hadn’t haven’t read it recently but it’s in my second cook book which is called “Fresh from a Vegetarian Kitchen,” I probably three pages on the umeboshi plum in that book, which is out of print right now but it’s available like for a dollar on Amazon.com so if anybody wants to get a copy.

Trevor: Right.

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Meredith: Yes so it’s a fermented food that’s used in Japan. It was always used by the ancient samurai because they would travel around the country side wildly without a place to live and they would drink stream water and just eat wild foods and stuff and so they would take the umeboshi plum on their trips because it’s antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal and it would actually prevent them getting dysentery.

Trevor: Right.

Meredith: And so there’s lots of books written on the umeboshi plum like kuzu another thing used in macrobiotics. It’s extremely alkaline food and it will really clean you’re your blood up really fast and I really rely on it particularly in the winter time when people are getting colds a lot and you know we’re working hard and it’s dark out a lot and cold, just to make an ume tea before you go to work in the morning or have one when you come home or to cook with it. Like in the summer, umeboshi plum paste is really delicious on fresh corn on the cob.

Trevor: On fresh corn on the cob, okay. I should have had some today. I had corn for lunch.

Meredith: Give it a try. It’s really surprising. So it turns out to be bright pink because of that shiso leaf that’s in there and it goes from that green color of the plums, to bright pink because of the shiso leaf that I believe it also adds to it. Anyway, it’s a very interesting food that you can just have a little bit of it plain on top of plain brown and it’s very tasty or you can cook it with cabbage, umeboshi cabbage is really quite delicious. Just a few pinches of it in the bottom of a pot with half an inch of water and put the cabbage right on top of it and it just makes cabbage taste just absolutely delicious and it’s just a way to get the food. It’s always been put in the center of rice bowls too because rice bowls are kind of the original Asian travel food and it’s and you shape it with moistened hands into a ball and you put the umeboshi plum in the center and it will keep the rice completely fresh for about four days.

Trevor: Wow!

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Macrobiotic Diet

Meredith: Yes it’s a preservative also and you put nori seaweed on the outside and you can take these balls with you on hiking trips or train or plane trips and it’s a way to have a really good healthy food to eat.

Trevor: And they don’t have to be refrigerated. Do you a recipe for that in the “Fresh from the Vegetarian Kitchen?”

Meredith: Yes I’m sure I do have it either in that or my first book was “American Macrobiotic Cuisine” and that’s also – I have copies of that one if anybody wants a signed copy otherwise you can get those on Amazon used or – out of print also.

Trevor: Great, I’ve got your “Fresh from a Vegetarian” book in front of me, would I find that recipe in the index if it was here or…?

Meredith: Yes just look for rice bowls. I can’t remember. I don’t have those books right in front of me. I don’t know if it was first book or my second book.

Trevor: Okay I’m looking right now, we’ve got…

Meredith: It will be rice balls for sushi or…

Trevor: I don’t see anything under rice balls and now if I go to sushi, let’s just take a quick look. I’m getting distracted by all these other yummy recipes. Okay so we’ve got California rolls, cucumber rice rolls…

Meredith: They’re also in there.

Trevor: Which ones?

Meredith: You also use it in sushi as well, so you can use them with boshi and sushi too.

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Macrobiotic Diet

Trevor: Do some of these recipes I just mention have the umeboshi plum in them?

Meredith: Yes, they do.

Trevor: Okay, good.

Meredith: Yes I can see there’s no rice ball there so yes. It must be an American macrobiotic cuisine because they’re very standard. I would have put them in the first book probably.

Trevor: Okay, let me chime in with a few things. For everyone that’s already read lesson 2 which I hope everyone has, there’s a chart that you can download which shows you which food is on the alkaline versus the acidic side and sure enough under the section called , umeboshi plum is highly alkaline. And if you go to vinegars, the umeboshi vinegar is mildly alkaline whereas almost all the other vinegars are acidic. The only other exception to that is apple cider vinegar which is also mildly alkaline.

Meredith: Right.

Trevor: So then I also wanted to refer people to lesson 30 of our program which is all about fermented soy products and we’re going to talk about – I’d like to ask you about seaweed in a moment but I also want to refer our students to lesson 35, which is all about sea vegetables.

Meredith: Right.

Trevor: Now we’re still waiting for more questions to come in. So if you’re on the call and you have a question or comment, please type it into the box on the webpage that – it’s the URL address that we sent you in the email. We do have a comment right now from Leonor and she says there is so much good fiber in tempeh as compared to and that’s one reason she prefers tempeh.

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Meredith: Definitely too and it’s less fat and more protein in tempeh as well. It’s a wonderful food.

Trevor: Good and I know there’s a lot of tempeh recipes in your cookbooks as well.

Meredith: Yes and you know in the traditional Japanese diet in the traditional macrobiotic diet, it really doesn’t have a lot of tofu. It’ll have small amounts here and there. It’s more of the American adaptation of tofu in the diet that has given us these huge amounts of it and stuff.

Trevor: So I was just thinking in case people want to find fermented soy recipes inside our program, lesson 30 has a bunch of them. There’s Meredith’s basic brazed tempeh and then there’s your brazed tempeh with green herb colief, did I pronounce that right?

Meredith: Colief.

Trevor: And then your tempeh and Marbella.

Meredith: Yes Marbella.

Trevor: Marbella, okay you can see I’m a real gourmet expert. And then Jill Nussinow contributed a couple of recipes too. There’s a grilled tempeh cutlets recipe and a tempeh veggie stir fry. God I’m getting hungry.

Meredith: Yes me too. Well those are the tempeh recipes. I taught those at summer camp this year that was my cooking – I always give a cooking class and then a lecture and this year I did tempeh and did a couple of those recipes that you just mentioned. It was really fun.

Trevor: Good and then I also want to remind people that in lesson 30.1, we have seven ways to sneak miso into your daily . And so I’ll just – since we don’t have too many questions, I’ll just run through them real quick. So for example when you make a bean or

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Macrobiotic Diet soup, you can just blend miso into the stock at the end of cooking. Tell us why it’s important not to boil miso Meredith?

Meredith: Well, there’s lots of ferments in the miso process and you don’t want to completely kill them by boiling. But the idea is that you want to actually make the food really digestible. So you want to heat it but not boil it.

Trevor: Okay so there’s friendly bacteria in there and you just don’t want to kill them by boiling it.

Meredith: That’s right.

Trevor: So the way I’ve always done it is after I’ve boiled whatever it is I'm making, like if it’s a soup with veggies in it, I’ll remove the soup from the stove and then add the miso and stir it in. Do you have any other tips on that?

Meredith: Well when you reheat it, you can reheat it. Not to feel like you can never reheat it again but you just don’t wan to boil it. You can kind of bring it up to that point but not boil it.

Trevor: Okay, which is your favorite brand of miso?

Meredith: I like the South River Farm and the one that’s in New England there.

Trevor: Okay.

Meredith: For heavens sakes I can’t think of the name of it right now but we talked about it in the miso article that we did.

Trevor: Right. Okay so I’m going to finish running through these tips for integrating miso into your daily diet. So you can blend it into a soup stock at the end of cooking. You can use sweet, white miso straight from the jar and spread it on crackers or bread and perhaps top it with

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Macrobiotic Diet vegetables. You can stir a teaspoon of the South River one year miso into a bowl of cooked oatmeal or other grain porridge and allow it to sit for a few minutes before eating. You can add a teaspoon of miso or tamari to a mashed ripe and then splash with a squeeze of lemon. You can heat up a can of low sodium organic beans from which you’ve drained the liquid, mash the beans, and saute in a little bit of oil and then add miso to taste and enjoy it on bread or a corn tortilla. You can heat up a can of low sodium organic soup and then add a little bit of miso diluted with some of the liquid from the soup. And then the last one I think is you can, let’s see it says this one is great over grains, beans, salads and vegetable dishes. Make an instant sauce or dressing by thinning one of these combinations with water and then there’s a few options like miso, mustard and water or miso, olive oil and water or miso, mustard and olive oil and water. Do these give you any – are these bringing any other ideas to mind Meredith?

Meredith: Did we say miso tahini?

Trevor: No I don’t think it’s in here.

Meredith: That’s a really common one. That’s very tasty. And just mixing, you know get your tahini, add a small amount of miso and then just enough hot liquid to make it a sauce. It’s really delicious.

Trevor: That sounds good. Okay let’s see if we have any new questions yet. Nope okay so folks we’re still waiting for your questions but in the meantime, Meredith I’m going to ask you about seaweed. That’s a food that I’ve always known to be part of macrobiotic cuisine and it’s not necessarily something that all vegans would eat so tell us about seaweed. Why is it important in macrobiotics?

Meredith: Okay. Well, seaweeds are foods that have been eaten by ancient cultures around the planet forever, and certainly in America, we weren't brought up with any kind of seaweeds that we were aware of anyway. There might have been thickeners in our ice cream, in our toothpaste that's actually ager sea vegetable flakes that we didn't know that at the time. So it really took, I believe macrobiotics to introduce seaweeds to most Americans and then Japanese

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Macrobiotic Diet cuisine also became popular and so we started seeing more and miso soup and nori around sushis. So that's I think how most Americans think about seaweed at this time, would be in a Japanese restaurant in those two forms, but macrobiotic cooking really use all sea vegetables that exist and a little bit everyday is recommended. Of course, if you want to keep it really quick and easy, you can just choose kombu, which is the Japanese word for kelp. And every time you cook a pot of beans, put a 3-inch piece of kombu in there and every time you cook a pot of rice or other grains, put a little piece of kombu in there as well, because it'll hold it's shape. So you can just pull it out before you eat it and it's soft enough like if you cook rice for an hour, it will be soft enough that you can just eat the seaweed as well if you want to, but you don’t have to serve it to other people that don't know what it is and wouldn’t want to know what it is. And sea vegetables are just so healthy that you just really want to get the minerals that are involved in them. They do have all 79 minerals and trace elements that exist in nature. So it's just a great adjunct to a vegan diet. Then wakame is a soft kelp and that's usually considered to be the miso soup seaweed. So you put that in there because by the time that wakame reconstitutes, seaweed will be, the soup will be cooked, and you can eat the seaweed, actually. You don't have to take it out or do anything with it. It's just soft enough to eat it. And then, of course, there's other seaweeds, I think the one that most people are familiar with is probably dulse, that's the red seaweed, kind of a moon-colored seaweed that's really high in iron and grows on the East Coast of this country and along Northern Europe and is particularly eaten in Ireland. And it's really delicious either raw or cooked. It's one of the only ones you can actually eat raw like nori. And then there's two that are really quite different but that you make little dishes with them by themselves with other vegetables, either [Inaudible 0:37:52] or . Arame cooks up really fast. It's like you don't really have to cook it, you can just soak it in water and eat it. It's very soft. The reason for that is that it's kind of like a kelp when it starts out it's really, fibrous and tough and what they do is they harvest it and then they slice it very, very thinly and cook it. So, and then they dehydrate it. So when we get it, all it needs to do is be soaked again, basically, or put in hot water either way. And then you can put it in salads or make a salad with some tofu and fresh corn and arugula with some of it in there, use it in a lot of different ways. And then the other one I just mentioned as it looks like a [Inaudible 0:38:41] but which is naturally that shape, that long stringy black shape is a hijiki. And that's the one that's highest in calcium of all the seaweeds, although they all have a good array of calcium. Hijiki has a very strong flavor. You soak it. It

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Macrobiotic Diet takes a long time to soak it to get it to the texture that you can actually do something with it. So you soak it, maybe at least half an hour and then you can saute onions and carrots. And onions and carrots are considered to be sweet vegetables. So they're nice to combine with a new food, like hijiki that will have a strong mineral rich flavor. That’s why I always get rid of that soaking water. I don't use that soaking water. It turns almost as black as the seaweed. It gets dark and I give it to my houseplants or just garden. It's got wonderful minerals in there, but it's strong. So the seaweed is good by itself and after you soaked it. And you can just add it to sauteed vegetables and it's really quite good and you can make little pies with it, strudels. It's a nice filling for a savory-type of dish like that.

Trevor: Okay, good. We do have a few more questions that have come in. So let's turn the floor over to the students. So first of all, Randy wants to know, what about seitan? Is it beneficial?

Meredith: Seitan, yes. I forgot to mention seitan. Seitan is actually wheat-gluten. And traditionally, in Buddhist monasteries, they didn't eat meat in Buddhist monasteries and certainly no dairy because Japanese people never were into dairy, until now things are changing, unfortunately. But the seitan was something that was developed in a Buddhist monastery when people were making dough and they ended up washing the dough or letting it soak or something like that, but the way that you do it is you soak the dough that you make with flour and water in water and you massage it with your hands. And what happens is that the wheat-germ and the wheat-bran and the wheat-starch will all come out into the water as you're massaging this dough. And what you're left with in your hands is the wheat-gluten. The part of the wheat that actually makes bread rise and that holds it together, easily. So that's the protein part of the wheat berry. So it's very high in protein and then they would take these kind of dumplings, they would tear it off in little two inch balls and put it in a broth made with water, kombu and soy sauce and ginger. And you bring that broth to boil, you drop in the pieces of gluten and they expand and become very flavorful kind of dumplings. So that's a very traditional, hundreds of years old protein staple that's still available today as you know in the stores. But wheat is not popular right now.

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Trevor: Yes. So right, especially the is the part that all of the celiacs and gluten-intolerant people can't have.

Meredith: Exactly.

Trevor: And there's been other calls where I think it's come up that even that aren't officially gluten-intolerant, might, how should I say, that gluten might not be the ideal food for even those people. Do you know much about the reasons why there’s this back-lash against gluten or can you speak to that?

Meredith: I think the main reasons, or I'll just say what I think because I'm not a scientist and I certainly, I've actually collected some articles that I haven't even read myself yet about the science of the gluten. I mean it's so in-depth at this point. I think it’s really partially a result of our conditions at this particular time in history, in American in particular. I think that we’ve had really poor quality bread during our childhoods and I think we've had way too much of it as a single grain and pasta and all the wheat-foods that we've eaten and have not necessarily been very good quality. And I think we've created a condition where we really can't handle that particular food anymore. I, myself don't have a reaction to it and certainly wheat is one of the grains of the world. It's one of the staple foods of the world. I think it's second to rice and being eaten by more on the planet than any other food. So to develop an intolerance to it, I think is more the body's reaction to poor quality than it is really anything that's really wrong with the food, unless you're making it a mono-food which a lot of us have done. A lot of us have grown up on nothing but wheat as a grain. We've never had another grain. I certainly never did.

Trevor: Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes. Like when we were kids, our parents didn't feed us [Inaudible 0:43:55]. They just gave us bread or wonder bread.

Meredith: No. And it was usually white, exactly.

Trevor: Yes, always white.

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Meredith: So I think that may have something to do with it because other cultures aren't having a problem with it. Maybe they are now because they've also gone the same way we have, but anyway, that's as much that I can say about it, not being a scientist.

Trevor: Okay. Well for those who are interested in wheat-gluten recipes and who are not gluten-intolerant, I refer you to Lesson 6, which is how to make meaty meals that your carnivorous spouse and kids will love. And in there, that was written by Eric Tucker the chef from Millennium restaurant. Thank you, Meredith. You're the one who referred me to him. And in there, there are, there's at least one if not two seitan recipes. There's a seitan, I'm not going to get this pronunciation if this at all. It's M-E-R-G-U-E-Z. Do you know how to say that Meredith?

Meredith: Merguez? No, I don't, Merguez, it sounds like.

Trevor: Well, anyways, there's a seitan sausage in Lesson 6.2. And I'm just looking to see, I think Lesson 6.3 is also a seitan-ish recipe as well.

Meredith: I have the recipe written down in my cookbook too. In fresh vegetarian kitchen, I have seitan recipe too that I made for hundreds of people back then.

Trevor: Okay, good. So you can look in either in our Lesson #6, or you can get Meredith's book for probably $1.00 on Amazon.

Meredith: Just one other thing on that, Trevor since we're on seitan. Originally, seitan wasn't made the way it's made now. When I first learned how to make seitan, we made it with whole wheat, we made a bread dough, with no salt in it but just made of bread dough of flour and water and often times we would grind the flour fresh. And then we would do, what I said before about massaging it, kind of underneath some warm water and alternate cold and warm water. But nowadays, everybody's just using straight gluten-flour. So all you have to do is add water and it turns immediately in to that texture. So I like the way it was before because it wasn't so chewy. It was more of a holistic food instead of just starting out with, basically manufactured wheat- gluten.

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Trevor: Right. Well I think the reason, I think that seitan's place in today's world is as a meat substitute for people that are vegan and vegetarian and miss having that meaty texture. Or I guess, perhaps for vegans or vegetarians whose kids want to eat meat or whose husbands want to eat meat and they're using this to replace meat. I mean, that is a pretty good benefit. So in my mind, it's a transitional food. I don't think it’s as much of a whole food as tempeh or brown rice, because there is some processing there. But as a transitional food to help you get satiated and get something that's tastes pretty darn close to meat it has it's place.

Meredith: Yes.

Trevor: Okay. We have a couple of more questions. First is from, Asa. Why are there different colors of miso?

Meredith: Well because they're made with different ingredients. Miso is a fermented soy or bean. I should just say it's a fermented grain and bean paste. So it’s used like a bullion and it's usually made with soy beans as the bean but it can be made with other beans. And that's one reason that it looks different in color. You can actually get chickpea miso. Sometimes you can find a dookie bean miso, green pea miso, for people that don't want soy or who are just having fun making miso with different ingredients. And then the other ingredient is the grain. Certainly, you can make miso with just soy beans, that's called hatcho miso. That's the darkest, strongest miso. It's really recommended for making strong blood in the middle of the winter, really when you're most compromised, your health may be most compromised. But there's also misos that are made with grains, such as brown rice miso, miso, I've seen miso. I've seen millet and chickpea miso. It's really interesting how many different combinations there can be.

Trevor: Okay, good. All right. Well, actually that was the last question for the moment. And so if anyone is listening and has a question, please go ahead and submit them. We've got about 10 minutes left.

Meredith: There are a couple of things that I can add if you want me to.

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Trevor: Yes. Go ahead, yes.

Meredith: I was going to mention that, I was just at the macrobiotic summer camp that they have every year and that this was the 41 st one and it was really interesting. I gave a lecture on food cravings and I definitely recommended the vegetarian mastery program to people and people were very interested in it. So I'm going to put in my email this month so people have the link and stuff. But that's a wonderful event where you can actually go and have foods that are prepared on wood-fires outside in [Inaudible 0:49:32] National Fort. Everybody sleeps in tents and there's an evening campfire and during the day, there's all sorts of classes. There's cooking class everyday, there's yoga, tai chi, all different types of exercises. And there's meditation, massage and lectures as well. It's just really a nice thing to go to. I totally enjoyed it for a week. No cellphones, you're way out there. You go to grass valley, and it's about an hour and half from grass valley in the mountains at a camp ground there and everybody sleeps in tents except for a few people that come with their RVs. And all the food is cooked outside on wood- fires. It's pretty amazing, and the people that run it, it's called the George Ohsawa, since he was the founder of Macrobiotics Foundation, and they’re in Chico. And they published the book acid and alkaline, which was the first one to come out on that topic, and a lot of other books as well. They sponsor the camp and they also have a bi-monthly magazine called Macrobiotics Today. And their website, I was just going to tell people since that's our topic tonight, is http://www.ohsawamacrobiotics.com . And it's on my website, as a link under my resources page on my website, which is http://www.healingcuisine.com . So that’s that connection. I wanted to let people know about that resource. And then, there's also a place down in [Inaudible 0:51:12] there's weekly dinners, weekly macrobiotic dinners that usually get 60 to 120 people every single Monday and that's been going on for 21 years, and it's definitely vegan. So everyone in the Bay Area, anyway, can enjoy it. They have a speaker about once a month, and it's great.

Trevor: Yes. I mean our students all over the world. So it's not really – it’s only useful for a minority to talk about regional events, unless it's like once a year conference.

Meredith: Yes. And that's what the summer camp is. It's only once a year for 41 years.

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Trevor: Is there a website where people can go to find, for example, macrobiotic restaurants or support groups or things like that, near their own area where they can type in the zip code?

Meredith: Yes. The one that I just mentioned to you is one resource. It's what I just said, http://www.ohsawamacrobiotics.com . They have a whole – the end of the magazine that they have which is called Macrobiotics Today has a resource section for the whole country. Yes, for the whole country. And then also, you'll see on my website, I don't have it right in front of me, but the Kushi Institute is the main teaching organization on the East Coast, and they also are connected worldwide, and you can go to their website. You could just see the link under resources on my website, and ask them about people in your area.

Trevor: Okay, good. All right, those are some good resources. Thank you.

Meredith: You're welcome. And let's see, I was going to also mention that they always say in macrobiotics, they say that the most important thing to develop in ourselves is gratitude for what nature provides. And there's a saying in macrobiotics called “1 grain, 10,000 grains” and just like brown rice, or most grains, when you plant one little grain and you get thousands of grains from the plant that comes out of that one grain. So they say that when we are healed and really learn a lot and get better by doing a that we're meant to express our gratitude by spreading it to others, 10,000 grains.

Trevor: Are there any other aspects of being macrobiotic, over and above just the foods that you choose to eat. For example, you mentioned earlier chewing 100 times or if not 100 than a lot of times. Is there anything else like, I don't know, meditating before you eat or making sure that you're sitting not standing when you eat or eating certain foods before other foods?

Meredith: Yes, all of that. I mean there is a lot involved. And it's all suggestions that have been passed down over time and they're all helpful to one degree or another, about trying to be as peaceful as possible around mealtime. And making it a bit of a meditation, having an actual plate on a mat, on a table, where you're seating there and to breathe deeply and at some macrobiotic

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Macrobiotic Diet events they’ll have one table, they did that at the summer camp this year. They have one table out of ten tables where people don't talk while they're eating. It's a silent table just so that people can experience the food because that's really what they came for was the food and the health that they'd like to derive from it. So that's one there. Many people in macrobiotics do meditate. A lot don't, also. It's kind of both ways but it's always suggested than it's an important thing to create peace in your life, and definitely around and especially around food, so that you're really digesting well. And there's things like the levels of judgment, which is an [Inaudible 0:55:11] medicine type of thing, seven levels of judgment. There's lots of different of things of just looking at the world in ways where we see how we fit in and that there are different levels of looking at things. Like the physical level, the sensory level, the sentimental level, intellectual, social, ideological, and absolute level. It's just all interesting philosophical looks at the world around us, basically, and how we fit in, kind of thing. And that we're acting at all those levels all the time, and how to develop our judgment. Oh, I wanted to tell you one other thing. Are you aware of Dr. Will Tuttle, who wrote The World Peace Diet?

Trevor: I know of him. I haven't read the book though.

Meredith: I think you'd really enjoy him. He was at the camp this summer and he gave two meditations and two lectures. And I totally enjoyed it. He’s pretty brilliant and it’s a vegan diet he's recommending and the book is totally amazing. And his presentation is just light and really, I think everybody would really enjoy it.

Trevor: You know Patty Brightman, who is one of our students actually, recommended I get in touch with him. Thought he might contribute some content, but it's, as I understand it, he's more talking about the impact of our food choices on the world and the planet, and not as much about specific health, like health benefits of such and such food.

Meredith: Yes he’s eating for spiritual health and social harmony.

Trevor: Right. And so who knows.

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Meredith: [Inaudible 0:57:01] program.

Trevor: Yes. That could be another, how should I say, that could be another, not necessarily a course but maybe a Q&A call on it's own or something like that.

Meredith: Yes.

Trevor: I don't know if that's specifically part of the mastery program, since this is about thriving with your physical health.

Meredith: I see. Well he's really a runner. He's amazing, all the stuff he does. He came back from Switzerland the night before the conference and then in the morning, woke up, took a 10- mile hike and made it back in time for his class.

Trevor: Wow.

Meredith: He didn't even look winded. He was amazing and it was really fun. I think you'd really like him.

Trevor: Well, thanks. You're the second person to recommend that I get in touch with him. So, thank you. So we're just about at time, and that's all the questions we have for tonight. So I want to thank you for your time and remind people, if they want to get some free recipes from you or your recipe books or other products or services where can they go?

Meredith: They can go to my website, http://www.healingcuisine.com . And that's where my cooking classes and some recipes and all sorts of good things are, and may e-club as well, something that people join for like $1.00 a week, and they get the latest diet and health news and a recipe every Monday, new recipe every Monday.

Trevor: Okay, good. And remind [crosstalk] go ahead.

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Meredith: I just said that I do counseling as well, and that's on there. You can see that there too.

Trevor: Okay. Remind people of the names of the out-of-print books, because I know Sweet & Natural is your one book that's in circulation and that people can buy new. But what of the other two that are more oriented towards macrobiotic meals?

Meredith: Yes. They can see them on my website. There's pictures and comments and everything on my website. The first one is called “American Macrobiotic Cuisine”. And the second one is called “Fresh from a Vegetarian Kitchen”. They're both vegan. So they're both appropriate.

Trevor: Okay, great. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Meredith. You have a great night.

Meredith: Thank you, Trevor. You too. Bye.

Trevor: Thanks, everyone. Okay. Bye.

[End of transcription 0:59:26]

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