The macrobiotic diet and the cosmic rays
Tucked away down the hallway on the first floor of a decrepit building on Rua Marechal Floriano was the Porto Alegre Macrobiotic Association, the oldest in South America. For some time I was a firm customer of their restaurant, where I ate lunch at least three times a week. Brown rice, azuki beans, Hokkaido pumpkin, boiled vegetables, bean soup with noodles and vegetables, all seasoned with burdock root, gersal and soy sauce. For dessert, cooked apples and plums or agar-agar jelly. Raw food, no way, as well as tomatoes, eggplant and English potatoes, all too much yin.
I no longer remember who took me to the restaurant for the first time, but I soon took a liking to it and made new friends, with whom I silently shared the table while we chewed our spoonfuls of rice tirelessly. From time to time I ventured out to cook my own lunch, scrupulously following the recipes in a little book I had bought at the time, which was lost only during my last move.
One day, I received an invitation to meet my acquaintances at a party at the house of Marcinha, the most popular girl in the group. I spent the days leading up to the party imagining what her house, a convinced macrobiotic and pamphleteer, would be like. I imagined a 1970s hippie-style kitchen, filled with herbs drying on the ceiling and glass jars full of grains and dried fruit, as well as shelves where mismatched crockery was stacked side by side with macrobiotic recipe books. In the living room I could foresee Indian cushions scattered on mattresses next to the floor and sticks of incense burning in every corner. But when I arrived at her house, I noticed with disappointment that the décor was modern and sober, and the buffet on the dining table had been ordered. Marcinha lived with her parents. At that moment I realized that macrobiotics were, indeed, people like us, and I could finally relax and feel part of the group.
Still by the front door, I slowly turned my face as I recognized my group of friends, all of them dressed in a sporty chic version of their daily attire. There was, however, one exotic figure who helped Marcinha do the honors of the house. "It's my brother," she said, smiling, as she stretched out her arm to this young man in a bowler hat on top of which a propeller was spinning non-stop. "It's to capture cosmic energy," he commented very seriously. His glasses, instead of lenses, had a very fine grid, to force the eye to look ahead and far away, and thus combat myopia. I remembered seeing advertisements for these glasses in magazines aimed at vegetarianism and alternative therapies.
In the years that followed, my macrobiotic diet evolved into a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet and remained so for more than twenty years, until the day I made two new discoveries. When I had my annual health check-up, the doctor told me that the zinc content of my blood was low and I should go back to eating meat to replenish it. "The vegetarian diet doesn't suit everyone," he told me. As well as 'vegetarian', I had to remove the prefix 'lacto' from my diet: I had just discovered that I was intolerant of milk. That left 'egg'. But this, as you know, remained banned from healthy diets until a few years ago.
Shortly after moving back to Porto Alegre, I decided to go to the city center to visit the Macrobiotic Association. I took off my rings, chains and earrings, removed the cards from my wallet, swapped my everyday bag for a small fanny pack and left the house under a barrage of advice from my mother: "Take care. The center is very dangerous these days, full of pickpockets! Don't let go of your bag". When I finally arrived at Rua Marechal Floriano, I discovered that the place was closed. The association had moved to the Lageado neighborhood many years ago and had recently gone bankrupt, losing its headquarters. I was sad to hear this, because with the Association's headquarters gone a whole stage of my life. Only the memories remain. Where have Marcinha, her brother and the rest of my macrobiotic fellows been?
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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