Modern Living: The Kosher of the Counterculture

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In macrobiotics, calories don't count. Neither does scientific nutritional balance, a concept that in the Age of Aquarius seems to carry little weight. "The only nutritional rules we disregard are modern ones," airily explains Elaine Mensoff, 21, who cooks for a Boston macrobiotic commune. Instead, macrobiotics concerns itself with those ancient complementary and opposite forces yin and yang, into which everything in the world is divided, including food. Sugar and most fruits, for example, tend to be very yin, while meats and eggs tend to be very yang. The trick is to balance one's menus to maintain a 5-to-l proportion of yin to yang. Since brown rice in itself contains this ratio, it is the principal food of the diet.

A Concession to Desire. Macrobiotics can be dangerous. The diet became notorious five years ago when a 24-year-old Greenwich Village housewife named Beth Ann Simon died after losing 50 Ibs. Beth Ann had starved for nine months, rarely going off Macrobiotic Regimen No. 7 (only whole grain cereals), which is prescribed for special healing purposes and is intended to be followed for only about ten days at a time. Other fatal cases of malnutrition as well as scurvy have been traced to diet No. 7. Their yin-yang balance notwithstanding, brown rice and cereals alone are deficient not only in protein but in vitamins A and C.

Most macrobiotics, as Ohsawa's devotees call themselves, try to follow his other nine diets, which are graduated from six to minus three to include increasing amounts of fish and vegetables —organically grown—along with brown rice. In actual practice, a good many youthful macrobiotics also eat meat. Explains Michel Abehsera, author of the cookbook recommended by the Whole Earth Catalog: "Meat finds its way into the Zen macrobiotic diet quite simply as a concession to man's sensual desires."

Clue in the Candy. The farthest-out macrobiotic lore, which would come as a surprise to the Zen Buddhist monks themselves, is to be found in the culinary columns of underground newspapers, where readers are routinely warned against eating too much meat, dairy products or sugar. A columnist in the Los Angeles Free Press, for example, recently speculated that the University of Texas massacre a few years back was caused by too much yin—in this case sugar—in the killer's blood. The clue that supported his conclusion: chocolate candy was found in the pockets of the slain sniper.

Macrobiotics, like other panaceas, can be many things to many people. Some think that it confers superhuman strength. But many macrobiotics use the diet to become less aggressive and, above all, more spiritual. "It's not the food that is important so much. It is the understanding. Through your food you are trying to attain the order of the universe," says Jimmy Silver, a Hollywood macrobiotic enthusiast.

There are sexual ramifications as well. "If I eat yang I slip into my desire body," says Michael Bobier, owner of an organic restaurant and food shop in Marin County, Calif. "Yin food makes me more ethereal. Women often find what is soft and gentle in a man most appealing about him. It's much easier to be tender on a yin diet."