Is macrobiotics all about food?

George Ohsawa

Macrobiotics is not only about food, what to eat and what to avoid, and a series of techniques to attain physical health. For George Ohsawa, the founder of Macrobiotic diet and `philosophy, the aim of macrobiotics was to improve our consciousness. All of us have the potential to be a better, more balanced and harmonious us and the purpose of macrobiotics is to have the physical and mental health that can take us to achieve our true potential.  The point is not food in itself, but how food influences and affects us in our process to achieve this greater consciousness.

The path towards it is a continuous task in which all our energetic bodies- physical, emotional and mental-  cooperate. Whatever affects the one, affects the others and therefore we should be able to understand the energetic needs of the three of them.  Nature is animated by energy in constant movement. In relation to that, macrobiotics could be defined as the study of the patterns of this energy movement.  If we understand how energy moves, we will not spend our lives going against it with a series of behaviors that sooner or later will bring about illness.

When I talk about alchemy in our kitchen and our lives, I am referring to the power we have to generate long term, surprising and powerful effects that bring quality, freedom and balance. We need to learn about the effects of different foods and their consequences. Once we are informed, we will be able to knowingly and freely choose what we want to create in our lives. And since we are all unique and constantly changing and moving with life, we will observe ourselves and our environment to be able to adjust to life’s changes.

So, going back to the question of the beginning, macrobiotics is for sure not a series of instructions about what to eat and what to avoid, but about learning how to use food to our advantage. Food is not the destination, it is only the way. If you want to know what you have to eat, you will have to determine first what you want to achieve. And here we have to make it clear that food is only part, although a big part, of the picture.  Food will help us enormously to attain the better us I was talking about before, but it will work in collaboration with other things.   

Last I would like to emphasize that macrobiotics cannot be any further from a rigid, static approach based on rules being as it is all about knowledge, freedom, flexibility and creativity.