13,145. RUDIMENTS, PT. 1,072

 RUDIMENTS,  pt. 1,072

(go ask Macrobius)

I was talking with someone the

other day  -  someone knowledgeable

about food and its farming, etc.  -  

and he mentioned to me an old

adage that went 'Only eat things

that rot, but eat them before they

rot.' The emphasis there, in his

voice, was on the word 'before.'

He had it all down pretty pat, and

I enjoyed the long, roadside, chat.

I knew a few 'rudimentary' things

of my own on the subject, but his

pithy little saying was far and above

better. I got to thinking of it in light

of the concept of 'Food' as its own

category; always wondering.

-

The small things I knew were

interesting enough, and we shared

ideas. There were conflicts among

those ideas. Good-natured, but

conflicts. When he told me the sort

of breakfast he ate, daily  -  serious,

cooked stuff  -  I said I never eat

breakfast at all....nor in fact lunch

either. He was aghast, mostly at 

the idea of the skipped breakfast. 

I always found, and he agreed, 

that people eat gratuitously, 

pounding down endless junk

and chemicals and crap without 

even thinking of it, as a sort of 

nervous reaction to a beleaguered 

life. However that went, I never

had heard of a daily 'hot' breakfast

before.

-

I told him my Macrobius story.

Macrobius was an old Roman guy

who theorized about food  -  way

back, long before supermarkets

and chemical feedlots and the

rest. His idea was that the ideal

Roman, in good dietary fashion,

should only eat that which was

grown nearby, by hand, and hands

on. Kind of what we now today

get to call 'Locally Grown,' at

farm markets and roadside stands.

Anyway, that was Macrobius's thing,

eating locally. But, somehow, over

the centuries it was transcribed into

a sort of severe, rice and grain, diet

which went by the name of 'macrobiotic.'

I never knew how that had happened,

and made mention of that, at which

point the other guy went into this

great, long tale of  'soil.' Yet another

intriguing subject at a roadside gab.

Dang, them farmers is cool.

-

He approached soil 'generationally.'

Something like approaching logging

by concentrating on first cuts only,

like from the 1660's on early American

settlements. The first real loggings on

this continent happened rather quickly;

onto what was considered virginal and

old-growth, primeval forests (tell that

to a native American and see what they

say). Within 75 years, between the needed

wood and timber for homes, barns, heat,
canals, boats and ships, rafts, corrals,
etc., etc., most of the original forest was
progressively destroyed  -  logged cleanly,
stripped and bared. Changing run-offs,
and changing the patterns of absorption
for seasonal rains and all the rest. That's
the info I knew. He knew soil.

-

His point became how Americans today

die, get cancer and disease, and are

poisoned by corporate foods that they

gleefully (and steadily) consume off

supermarket shelves, because century

after century of continued and heavy

farming had stripped the soil of the

needed rest periods for regenerating

local content of minerals, etc., and,

at the same time, that soil had been

torturously overfed with chemical

supplements and fertilizers and God

knows what else, because the yearly

farmer, small farms or corporate spreads,

continues to demand greater yield.

(It sounds like the stock market too).

-

The result is junk, trash, garbage,

still called food. Processed, and

re-worked, pre-packaged, sugared

up, even made frivolous as food,

it has become what people eat.

-

Now, I ask, such a prevalence as

just described, with no one really

knowing any longer from where

their food comes  -  except that

the 'supermarket' which peddles

it to them is local  - is that now

considered 'eating local?' Let

all go ask Macrobious. 
-

Well, it was all a sort of a test,
and he called me out. I had made
all that up, to see if he'd catch it.

And he did; starts to tell me about
some Japanese guy named
Ozawa who had developed the
Macrobiotic Diet.  He knew his
stuff, this framer guy, and my
head was full of soil.