Good health is one aspect of macrobiotic living. On a broader level, macrobiotics also aspires to a central role in bringing about social evolution and global stability. Ohsawa even saw world peace as the eventual successful outcome of the universal practice of macrobiotics.
The 'win-winӠequation runs: healthy food = healthy people = healthy societies = peace. Ohsawa died in 1966, just a few months before the 'Peace OlympicsӠwhich he had planned. One of his colleagues, Michio Kushi, went on to found 'East-WestӠmacrobiotic study centres around the world and the movement is still active and growing. The core ideas of macrobiotics had also entered the mainstream. Back in 1966 Dr. Fredrick Stare, the eminent Harvard nutritionist, wrote in ReaderԳ Digest: эacrobiotics is the diet thatԳ killing our kidsѬ so alarmed was he at its departure from convention. Today the Harvard School of Public Health cites macrobiotics as an example of the kind of diet that Americans should adopt to avoid diet-related health disease and getting fat.
Ohsawa urged macrobiotic-followers to read Erewhon, the novel by Samuel Butler, describing a Utopia in which sick people are thrown in prisons and criminals treated in hospitals. In 1974 a Pennsylvania prison initiated a programme of macrobiotic food for prisoners. Rates of violence fell, as did the number of re-offences.
Macrobiotics for Beginners
Jo Sandifer, Bob Lloyd
Piatkus 2000
ISBN 0 749 92119 6
