Dharma Feast Cookbook (5 page)

You don’t need too many different ingredients within each dish. Keeping ingredients lists small makes the food easier to digest. For example, you can prepare a satisfying salad with greens and three other vegetables. The same applies to spices. Use sauces and dressings sparingly to highlight the taste of the whole food you are serving. Let those natural flavors come to life! Many of us have over-stimulated taste buds so it may take time to appreciate food’S natural flavors.

Take the time to observe how much you put on your plate and how you feel after eating. Some people pile large portions on their plates and eat only two-thirds, or overeat. It is an art to eat the right amount of food, but an art worth mastering.

Years ago we met a man who ate nothing but fruits and greens. He also ate only one food at each meal. For dinner one evening he only ate bananas while we ate pizza. He had been on this diet for fifteen or so years. we’re not recommending his diet by any stretch of the imagination—just sharing an experience we had which gave us a new reference point for simplicity.

If we eat in restaurants regularly because our profession demands it, we might order a salad with a simple dressing, a baked potato, and some vegetarian soup, rather than a fancy shrimp dish, some kind of fried food appetizer, a soda or glass of wine, meat or fish, and dessert. There’S something humble and noble in the first choice. At times, other people may think our eating habits are a bit out of the ordinary, but that’S okay.

¹
“Dharma” refers to the universal truths that underlie all of life. It is the intrinsic nature of things, the right order of things; life as it is—the natural condition and essence of everything.

Different approaches can lead us to an intentional relationship with food. Some people choose to strictly follow a specific system, such as macrobiotics or raw food. Another approach is to draw information from different dietary regimes that support healthy eating. This is the approach we take in
Dharma Feast Cookbook.

The following sections highlight the most important influences on our Dharma Feast diet. Our descriptions are meant to give you a sense of the context and content of each of these influences. If you resonate with one or more of them, many books about each one are available to guide you.

#1—The Vegetarian Diet

One argument for a vegetarian diet looks at our dental structure and digestive juices and concludes that these reflect the eating tools of herbivores. We aren’t meant to eat meat or fish, some vegetarian proponents say, as our teeth aren’t designed to tear it and our digestive juices aren’t designed to digest it.

While health experts differ on that particular argument, it is commonly accepted that lighter proteins are easier to digest, and that digestion is one of the essential keys to health. For example, fish is easier to digest than meat, and in general, plant-based protein is easier to digest than animal-based protein because less hydrochloric acid is needed to break it down.

Also, eating animals and animal-based products (such as dairy) is scientifically linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, osteoporosis, and more. These conclusions are substantiated in the book
The China Study,
which was run jointly by Cornell University, Oxford University, and the Chinese Academy of Preventative

Medicine. The researchers conducted their own studies and also referenced the findings of other respected researchers and clinicians over the past fifty years. All pointed to the recommendation of a plant-based diet over an animal-based one for optimal health. We recommend reading
The China Study.

If we eat a typical American or even European diet, we are eating 70 to 100 grams of protein a day, most of which comes from animal products (meat, fish, dairy, eggs). This is up to ten times more protein than people eat in Asian countries, and these populations have significantly less degenerative disease than we do. For example,
The China Study
states that an animal proteinbased diet leads to a 17-times higher incidence of death from heart disease in American men compared to Chinese men.

Our bodies need protein—we can’t live without it. Proteins function as hormones and enzymes, and are a part of structural tissue. They have to be continually replaced. When we eat a protein, we break it down into its building blocks, called amino acids, and these are the building blocks we use to rebuild proteins we’ve lost.

The body itself is able to make many of the amino acids that are needed, but eight of them must come from the food we eat. Eating a variety of vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, and fermented foods gives us all the additional ones we need. Be careful, though—our body only recognizes whole food in its natural state. When food is processed we’re basically taking nature apart. If we eat isolated proteins, for example in isolated protein powder, the body doesn’t recognize it and it is much more difficult, and in some instances impossible, to assimilate.

Our vegetarian approach in
Dharma Feast Cookbook
is based on the fact that the closer we eat to the original source of energy—the sun— the more of that energy we get. All life gets its energy from the sun, but only plants can get it directly, through photosynthesis. We can’t photosynthesize so our choices are to eat things that do (plants), or to eat things that eat things that do (plant-eating animals). Only 10 percent of the stored energy in plants makes it to the meat of the animals that eat them, so eating plants is the best and most efficient way to get the energy we need.

Finally, it’s not that we never recommend the use of meat in your diet. If you are frail you may need to eat it to get enough protein for your muscles. Another instance where plant-based proteins may not be enough for a period of time is if a person is in a state of severe nutritional deficiency. Of course this needs to be determined by a health professional.

#2—A Raw Food Diet

"Raw” means foods in their whole, natural state. Any plant or animal food, when not heated over 110 degrees F (43 degrees C), canned, or frozen, is a raw food. Every food in this state has the enzymes it needs for digestion. The Eskimos eat raw meat and have no heart disease because raw meat contains high amounts of protease, the enzyme that helps digest protein. Raw nuts contain the appropriate amount of lipase, the enzyme that helps digest fats. This is a pristine example of the intelligence of life. Cooking, canning, and freezing destroys these enzymes. Vitamins, minerals, and proteins can also be either altered or destroyed when cooked.

The foundation of eating raw foods is that they contain everything our bodies need in order to break down, digest, and assimilate them easily. One might then ask why not eat a 100 percent raw food diet if this is the case. Our experience is that most people do not have the desire, discipline, constitution, or lifestyle to do so. While eating raw may be what’S needed for a time, it is a difficult diet to maintain, especially if we add in the demands of family, professional life, and city life.

A good goal is a 50 percent to 75 percent raw food diet, combined with cooked beans and grains, steamed vegetables, roasted nuts and seeds, and fermented foods. At the same time, different people tend to function better with more or less of this amount of raw food, or with even a minimal amount of animal products, depending on one’S profession, one’S state of health, and the climate one lives in.

As we begin to eat a greater percentage raw, our overall calorie count declines. We may begin to crave carbohydrates such as pastas and breads to fill in for the “missing” calories. We can add beans and soaked raw nuts and seeds instead. While raw nuts and seeds give us the calories we need, they are difficult for the body to break down, so we soak or toast them and eat them in small quantities. To learn how to soak and toast nuts and seeds for optimal digestion, see
Soak and Toast Nuts and Seeds
in
How To,
Chapter 6
.

Our protein and fat intake will also drop with a raw food diet. We may start craving foods that have high concentrations of these substances (meat, dairy products, sweets) because our bodies may have become inefficient at processing vegetarian and raw food. They have not had to work as they naturally should to get fats and proteins from food because we have overloaded them with foods that have these substances in highly concentrated amounts. It’S similar to a student who cheats on tests at school. The longer they cheat, the more they lose their ability to study. If they begin studying again, at first it will be very difficult and the desire to cheat will
feel overwhelming. Just as studying will become easier over time, the body will readjust itself over time and begin to take what it needs from vegetarian whole food sources and our cravings will ease.

#3—Macrobiotics

This diet is based on the ancient rural Japanese diet. It consists primarily of whole grains, vegetables, soups (especially miso), seaweed, beans, and minimal fruit. Condiments include nuts, seeds, typical Asian condiments like soy sauce, and fermented foods like pickles and sauerkraut. Because it relies so heavily on grains, it is very grounding.

Key to this diet is balance. It is maintained by making choices in five areas—the energy of food and how it is prepared, the balance of acid and alkaline (what the Japanese have long referred to as
yin
and yang
¹
), the impact of foods on blood sugar levels, the ratio between sodium and potassium, and the preference for local, seasonal foods.

Macrobiotics emphasizes eating living foods. These are foods which can continue to grow even after they are harvested. For example, beans and grains will sprout, and greens, if put in water, will continue to live. Fermented foods contain living organisms.

According to this philosophy, the way food grows and how it is cooked influences its energy. Foods which grow vertically up—like greens—are believed to focus energy in the head and chest. Root vegetables grow down, which makes them more grounding. Vegetables like squash and potatoes grow out, spreading energy outward.

Horizontal foods, like cucumbers and zucchini, concentrate energy inward. At which stage these foods are harvested also has an energetic impact. Macrobiotic experts say that plants harvested early in their growing cycle provide us with energy for growth and expansion. Mature plants give us the energy needed to learn from our experiences and absorb wisdom.

Cooking techniques also affect the energy of the body, with much the same impact as the direction of growth. Steaming focuses energy up, while stewing moves it down. Sautéing moves it outward and boiling focuses it inward.

Of core importance in macrobiotic teaching is listening to the body, which tells us what to do when we lose our equilibrium. Using this system we learn to choose what foods to eat and how to prepare them based on what we need. And, on a day-to-day basis, we eat from a variety of growth and cooking styles. However, if we are feeling out of balance, we focus on the foods and styles that we know will balance us. For example, we can reduce a lack of clarity by eating steamed, upward-growing foods, as they focus energy in the head. If we are sick we may need to concentrate energy inward for healing, so we choose horizontal foods and boil them. If we need both upward and outward energy, we steam potatoes.

Keeping a balance between
yin
and
yang,
acid and alkaline, is important for health. Please see
The Acid/Alkaline Consideration
below (#5) for further information.

Another way the macrobiotic diet maintains balance in our health and emotions is by paying attention to blood-sugar levels. All foods impact blood sugar. The glycemic index (GI) number assigned to a food tells us how fast its carbohydrates turn into sugar. The higher the number the faster it happens and the more havoc it wreaks as our energy surges and then crashes.