Long ago while stationed in Japan, I picked up a book in English on the macrobiotic diet by that Michio Kushi guy. I was just starting to get an interest in using food to regulate my health and happiness - a warped path many of us take at some point - and the macrobiotic diet certainly had a point of view in those areas. As a naive young woman looking to improve my diet, I read the book with a slight sense of awe that here was the perfect diet as proven by all these people who had managed to save themselves from death or obesity or failure by adopting the macrobiotic diet. That's how I read books by experts when I was young. I believed until proven otherwise or until time allowed me the chance to reflect on what an author had to tell me.
After a sinking feeling that my years of eating tomatoes and potatoes (members of the nightshade family and thus considered by macrobiotic practitioners as toxic to humans) had doomed me to poor health, I started to notice a certain pattern throughout the book. Foods and thinking which originated outside Japan, bad. Foods and thinking which originated in Japan, good. The same went for physical characteristics; freckles are a cultural and dietal aberration along with not being Japanese. While one can't help not being Japanese, we can work on being more like the author by following his minute and exacting instructions on how to properly live and eat.
Thank God I'm a lazy person. I could never have devoted myself to the rigours of following all the diet's dictums -- pages and pages on exactly what to eat, when, and how. There were even instructions on how to properly shower and dry off! To vigorously scrub off that non-Asian was the idea. Yes, I did come to see the diet as faintly racist.
I'm intriqued by lifestyle diets which promise happiness and health if only the reader has the courage to follow the author's excruciatingly detailed plans. Absolutism sells. Just what leads so many of us to look for answers in such places? Why do we crave giving up our own judgement in order to pursue some other person's definition of living correctly? That is what that first peek into the world of controlling one's diet as a means to controlling one's destiny meant to me. It's part of the answer to the riddle of our nature as humans, particularly the nature of curious and intelligent humans, to seek solutions to our anxieties through a complete control of our digestive system.
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Posted by: Beats Headphones | 09/13/2012 at 10:35 PM