Craig Sams, who I have had the good fortune to interview for both my books published by Repeater, “Retreat” and “The Garden”, has used AI to make a song about Macrobiotic food. It came out rather well.
Sams makes the point that there’s almost nothing about Macrobiotics mentioned in the body of popular music. This is indeed strange given how massive the diet was in the hippie era.
In my research for Retreat I only came across two musical references, Don Cherry’s “Brown Rice”, and Bob Dylan in “On the Road Again” (“So I get brown rice, seaweed and a dirty hot dog.”) Sams had another good one, a novelty hit by Larry Groce, “Junk Food Junkie.”
Sams says the diet, “kept me in good health after I was unwell with hepatitis from my travels in Afghanistan and India.” At SEED, the restaurant favoured by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, he and his brother Gregory served Macrobiotic food.
From my library: Craig Sams’ book on Macrobiotics from 1972.
Macrobiotics wasn’t a diet per se – my own take on it was that it was a method of balancing your food to establish some particular cosmic accord. If you wanted the etheric high of a cave-dwelling saint, you should eat only brown rice: “Yin”. If you were prepared to slum it with the rest of us in samsara, you could have some whiskey: “Yang.”
However, it tended to be understood by the hippies as an injunction to only eat brown rice. In fact, if Macrobiotics is understood correctly, any grain would suffice! Researching for “The Garden” I came across self-sufficiency guru John Seymour quite correctly decrying this:
It is ridiculous for a whole generation of freaks in Britain to grow up thinking that the only good food to eat is “brown rice”, for example. We don’t grow rice in Britain. We grow wheat, and we should eat that – it’s a much better food than rice anyway.
John Seymour “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” (1978)
Macrobiotics books in my library.
I really went deep into researching Macrobiotics because, frankly, the depth is there. George Ohsawa’s early philosophical tract “The Unique Principle” (1931), published by the extremely highbrow and respected Vrin imprint, is one of the best books one can read about Eastern philosophy. In 2018, I visited sites in Kyoto frequented by Ohsawa and most notably the Macrobiotic HQ in Tokyo. I wonder if it is still there?
