Toward Ecosophy

I spent some of this evening reading an old book on macrobiotic home remedies by Michio Kushi -- one of the few relics I still have of my extended flirtation with the macrobiotic diet back when I was young and wet behind the ears and willing to try just about anything. It was, in several senses of the word, an educational experience; it taught me among other things that my body doesn't handle a vegan diet at all well -- I don't process vegetable protein adequately, and so I ended up with the classic vegan syndrome, pale and gaunt and catching every cold that came through, before I figured out that my body was desperately trying to tell me that I needed a cheeseburger or the close equivalent every so often to stay in good health. 

The thing is, there's actually a lot of wisdom and a lot of useful material in the macrobiotic tradition; it just got taken to unproductive extremes -- again, in several senses of the word. The notion that meat is always bad, that sugar is always bad, that this whole list of vegetables over here is bad, and so on and so forth, was neither necessary nor healthy, and let's not even talk about the pervasive tendency in a lot of macrobiotic scenes to push people toward the extreme forms of the diet, just rice and a few suitably yang vegetables and fermented soy products and tea. That's great if you're a Zen monk in a monastery, not so great if you live in the midst of a modern city and stay active in the world. 

And then there were the overblown health claims, especially the insistence that the macrobiotic diet would cure cancer. In some cases, maybe;but Aveline Kushi, one of the most respected macrobiotic teachers in the world, who'd been eating macrobiotic meals for I forget how many decades, died in 2001 of -- you guessed it -- cancer. She wasn't the only leading macrobiotic person to go that way, either. (People who promote cancer-curing diets tend to die of cancer at a rate that seems to exceed chance. Adele Davis, I'm looking at you...) 

And yet, again, there's a lot of wisdom and a lot of useful material in macrobiotics. You can treat quite a few ordinary ailments (colds, digestive upsets, etc.) with the preparations in the book I was reading, and prevent many others by adjusting what you eat to bring your body back into balance in various ways. Some of the other things that got caught up in the macrobiotic movement were invaluable -- Do-in, a system of self-massage related to acupressure, is high on my list here; it's a very effective self-healing modality. And a lot of the food tastes good. :-)

I read online just now that the Kushi Institute in Massachusetts shut down a few years ago owing umpty-thousand dollars in back property taxes. What was once a thriving movement seems to be on its last legs, the victim of its own excesses. (Too much Yang, not enough Yin, and I don't think a change of diet would have fixed that.) It's probably a good thing, since the extreme macrobiotics types were just as abrasive and self-righteousness as evangelical vegans nowadays, but I'll be sad to see a lot of good tossed out with the mistakes. 

Or maybe it's just that I'm well into middle age, and watching the dreams of my youth fade out.