Q&A on Japanese macrobiotic products with Craig Sams Q: Do we need to eat Japanese foods in order to be eating a macrobiotic diet? A: Japanese sea vegetables are the best – well prepared, carefully washed and packed (think nori and hiziki particularly). But I don’t see any reason why European producers couldn’t do as well. With sea pollution increasing everywhere the primary concern should be the quality of the seawater in which the vegetables are grown. Wasabi can be replaced with horseradish. Shoyu and miso are good for umami flavours and the mellowing that takes place during long fermentations probably makes them better than quick and dirty methods of getting glutamic acid, but it’s still pretty close to msg. If you’re deficient in intestinal flora, there are far more effective ways of boosting the population. Whole grains and vegetables are the core, not eating to much is the hardest thing for most people. Quantity is the issue people tend to avoid by focusing on quality. Q: Can people overdo on macrobiotic Japanese products? A: People can overdo anything. Each to his own. It’s a lot harder to overdo macrobiotic products than junk products such as burgers, coke, ice cream, booze or nightshades like tomatoes or cigarettes. Q: Isnt macrobiotics about living from local foods and resources ? A: Yes, but it’s also about enjoying tea and cocoa and other foods that don’t grow in our region. We shouldnt really be living in Northern Europe, unless we exist on seal blubber and rabbit meat, but the Gulf Stream has made it habitable and here we are. The first Hokkaido pumpkins came from Massachusetts, via Commodore Perry, to Yokohama and then to Hokkaido, then to Belgium, then to England. There are all sorts of strong and self-interested health, social and economic reasons to support a local economy – but health should come first. Q: Is it profits before what people really need? A: When people can make profits it indicates that there is demand. There are people making profits from processing products like miso and seaweed in the UK. I find the implicit utilitarianism of the question worrying – we arent in Mao’s China now, perhaps we should be, given current rates of overconsumption of resources, but let’s get it into perspective and not become obsessively frugal. The macrobiotic way puts justice first and to worry that a few producers in Japan or importers in Europe are making profits by supplying Japanese commodities is to focus on the wrong issues. Apart from anything else, because Japanese products are commodities nowadays, there is little profit to be had from them. That’s one reason I stopped importing from Japan in the early 1980s – there was more money and less competition doing products that appealed to macrobiotics but werent standard undifferentiated (and un-differentiatable) kuzu, shoyu, miso and nori. Just for your interest - I stopped using umeboshi some time ago, just pick a harvest of sloes every autumn and salt them. They are just as good as umeboshi, perform exactly the same function, virtually indistinguishable in a kuzu or arrowroot gel. The UK equivalent is wild service berries, which people used to pick whole branches of in the autumn, then hang in the kitchen and people would eat when they needed the sorbic acid, ratted by hanging. Craig Sams en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Sams
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 11:17:27 +0000
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