We searched in vain for a reply and finally asked what "Macrobiotic" meant.
"Macro is 'great' biotic is life--the great life. You eat this food and you become conscious of things you never knew before. First your body feels better, then you get smarter."
The soup arrived, a thick brown broth with carrots floating in it, Miso soup, " Whittaker explained, "grains and lily roots."
A young man whom we recognized as a recent Harvard graduate joined us. He had changed since we saw him last. Now he was extremely thin with a sallow face and bright eyes. His clothes were baggy, showing ho much weight he had lost. He asked whether we had any questions.
"Just what is yin and yang?" we asked desperately.
"Yin and yang are the thesis and antithesis of the monistic cosmology of the Orient; you might call it a polarizable dialectic monism. Everything in the world is yin and yang. The principle of yin-yang applied to biology becomes the art of longevity and rejuvenation in Far-Eastern medicine. Disease is proof of the violation of universal order expressed through the neglect of the body."
He continued, telling us how he had started on Macrobiotics. "Some of my friends around the Square were eating it; I thought they were crazy. Then I bought some brows rice and cooked it in my room. I He went back to telling us how brown rice was so much safer than drugs. Drugs destroy the nervous system, he said. One Harvard Macrobiotic had taken so much LSD that his nerves became insensitive to starvation pains. Mr. Kushi had tried to save the young man from starving, our friend said; he had diagnosed the student's condition as extreme yang and fed him yin foods. When he died at the Institute a week before Christmas, he weighed 90 pounds, although he was nearly six feet tall. Our friend seemed to accept his death with calm resolve. This lack of emotion did not surprise us. Before our visit, we had called Dr. Frederick Stare of the Harvard School of Public Health and asked him if there was medical explanation for Macrobiotic happiness. "There's not a grain of truth in those brown rice grains," was his reply. In fact, he added, Macrobiotics usually lost all sexual desire, were prone to periods of moroseness and acted without emotion. Oh, Transmutation! Our Harvard friend showed us a few samples of Macrobiotic prose, a book called Transmutations Naturelles by Louis Kervran, a professor at the University of Paris, and The Philosophy of Oriental Medicine, by George Ohsawa, the founder of the Dict. We noticed a passage in Ohsawa's book: "Our physiological life is a transmutation of yin colors to yang ones. Our health, happiness and freedom depend on that transmutation. How simple it is! This is life! Here is one of life's great secrets! Oh, transmutation!" At this point the main course arrived, a plate heaped high with whole-wheat noodles, a vegetable tempora, fried lily-root, seaweed, and brown rice. Across the table from us a young man with a straggly, pointed heard was explaining the crucifixion. "Christ was in an extremely yang condition after carrying the cross up the hill. While he was nailed to it--which made him more yang--his disciples gave him vinegar on a reed. Vinegar is very yin, and it paralyzed his nervous system, which is also, yin. He got even more yin when they placed him in a damp cave. The paralysis didn't wear off for three days." Just then a short, thin man dressed in loose blue pants and a baggy gray sweater entered and glanced around the room. "Ah, yes," Mr. Kushi said, nodding at his Macrobiotic friends, "beautiful, very beautiful." The beautiful people--several old ladies from Dorchester, a few gray-haired Negroes from Roxbury, some middle-aged business men from Medford, and the students from Cambridge--greeted him. Read more in News
