Down with the Cities Part 14

What an animal naturally eats is decided by instinct, and instinct here is preference, and the ability to obtain what it needs. A cat is not able to eat chestnuts, nor does it care at all for the taste or flavor of chestnuts; a squirrel, on the other hand, has the claws and teeth with which to open and eat chestnuts, and it finds them quite delicious as well.

But how about human beings? Extremely clever and arrogant as they are, human beings ignored the laws that governed what they should eat. Learning how to use utensils, fire, and various seasonings, they were able to eat things which, originally, they could not eat, or should not eat.

The things human beings desire and can obtain and eat without the use of tools or fire are, for example, nuts and fruit, plants, seeds, potatoes, small fish, and eggs (if you give a monkey an egg it will skillfully break the sh.e.l.l and suck out the contents -- monkeys and human beings naturally eat the same things). So it is that, no matter how much of a brave and strong Tarzan one is, it is probably quite impossible to catch and butcher bovine animals and whales with one's bare hands.

The Human Diet: Crime and Punishment

By the use of utensils, fire, and seasonings human beings changed their natural diets, thereby increasing almost limitlessly the things they can eat, and by transforming themselves into hunting, eating animals, have increased their numbers dramatically. On the other hand, however, they weakened themselves physically. Not only that, they also process their natural foods with heat and seasonings, thus killing the life within their food, destroying the cells, and substantially decreasing the beneficial effects of the food. Thus if we do not stuff our bodies full we cannot get enough nutrition, and this has brought about the transformation of the human being into the greatest eating animal on Earth.

Note first of all that human beings suffer serious tooth decay, something we don't see much in wild animals. We catch colds all the time. We are troubled by chronic digestive disorders (only humans use bathroom tissue; if an animal is healthy its excrement will not stick to its body). We perspire profusely (since perspiration is a means of getting rid of wastes, sweating a lot is proof that one's body is full of sewage; no matter how hot it is, one should perspire only moderately). And in recent years we have come to live in fear of chronic illness brought on by the compound effects of many chemical substances that are foreign to our bodies.

Though the net of Heaven is course, it has not overlooked the human rebellion against our natural diet. The fact that human beings have barely managed to survive in spite of this is due to the fact that we have continued, as we should, to consume some fruit and vegetables raw. Raw vegetables with meat, pickled vegetables with white rice, and fruit for dessert.

Our Modern Diet has Brought about Sickness and the Weakening of Our Bodies

Utensils and fire and seasoning -- the great transformation in the natural diet of human beings, and the great rebellion against Nature. This is known as cooking or cuisine. And in cooking we find the following three regrettable elements:

1.

How can one, using utensils and heat and seasonings, make it possible to eat things which one cannot ordinarily eat?

2.

How can one make things taste good, and stuff a lot into one's stomach?

3.

How can one destroy the life and cells of one's food, thereby diminis.h.i.+ng its effect?

What we must be aware of here is that even the provincial cooking of a hundred years ago varies not a bit from these themes, and even if we look back 50 or 100 thousand years, there is little difference. They say that our remaining canine teeth prove that primitive human beings were carnivorous animals, but I do not believe it. Almost a million and a half years ago human beings had already learned how to use fire, thereby changing their natural diets. Canine teeth were no doubt used to open and eat chestnuts and other hard nuts.

Human beings are born with both fists tightly clenched. If you put a stick in a baby's hands it will hang from the stick, and if you lift the stick, the upper half of the baby's body will follow. If you provide some stimulus to the soles of its feet, the baby's toes will bend as if they are trying to grasp something. This indicates that, even now, the structure of the human body is adapted to climbing trees in search of fruit and nuts, and it has changed little from millions of years ago. This also shows that there ought to be no change in the human diet, either. It was, after all, quite impossible for human beings to become lions or hyenas.

In addition to (or in connection with) the three elements of cooking described above, human beings have committed further crimes: They have changed the shape and appearance of their food, pulverized it, a.n.a.lyzed it, extracted it, mixed it, and compounded it.

Wild animals eat what is natural for them to eat, and they eat it in its original form, thereby obeying this iron-clad law of Nature. Thus they maintain their health without a single doctor, a single pill, or a single hospital. It is only human beings that make brown rice into white rice; remove the hull of wheat and grind it into white powder; remove the head and bones of fish, leaving only the soft flesh; separate the fats from milk and make it into b.u.t.ter; or extract vitamins and make them into pills.

Because of this it is only human beings that suffer from corpulence, undue loss of weight, sickness, and early aging and death. Seeing that they were in trouble, people then founded the nutritional sciences, and began calculating everything -- consume a certain percent of this, so many grams of this, or so many milliliters of that. But it turns out to be half-baked, for we can see that the results of those school lunches, which are models of nutritional science, are fat and sickly children. Just compare these children with wild animals, which do not study the nutritional sciences, but manage to keep themselves fit and trim.

Let Us Begin Training Ourselves to Eat Things Raw

We ought to begin training ourselves to eat things raw and in their original form, and we should eat things that we can obtain with our bare hands. Even if it is only a handful a day, we should try eating brown rice, wheat, and corn (not to mention fruit and vegetables) raw and unprocessed. We should not underestimate the positive effect of even this little bit. Eating even one grain raw will do us that much good. The net of Heaven is coa.r.s.e but lets nothing escape -- those who make light of one grain of brown rice will find themselves bound by the erroneous idea of "permissible levels." There is no gainsaying that, for every one milligram of food additives one consumes, the liver suffers correspondingly. The law of permissible levels, which is convenient for the manufacturers of such additives, is not to be found in Nature.

One must chew a hundred times and secrete three cupfuls of saliva in order to eat a handful of uncooked brown rice. It is impossible to eat it otherwise. Is the reader aware that the hull portion of cooked brown rice pa.s.ses through the gut and is found in great quant.i.ty in one's excrement? This is the result of cooking the rice in order to make it easier to eat, but if one eats it uncooked the hull too is well chewed. In saliva there is a hormone called parotin which helps order the body's functions.

What is more, chewing something hard strengthens the teeth, and also stimulates the working of the brain.

In addition, the real flavor of something is revived by eating it raw. For instance, if one eats and compares raw corn and cake, one is well aware of how the cake is a tasteless lump of dead matter, and how the raw corn is most delicious, and overflowing with life force. Just try offering a lion raw and cooked meat, or a chicken wheat and crackers, and see for yourself which one they will choose.

For those people whose sense of taste has been artificially deadened and who claim that they cannot eat raw food because it tastes terrible, I offer the following advice: Go a day without eating and then try it. And those who have bad teeth and cannot eat raw grain can grind it into powder with a stone mortar and knead it with water.

Health Recovery and Food Conservation: Eat it Raw

If you eat cooked brown rice instead of cooked white rice, you will need only two-thirds as much, and if you eat the brown rice uncooked, you will find you can eat only one-third as much. By making white rice one discards the best part, and by cooking it one kills the cells and the life within; thus, in order to take in sufficient nutrients, one must stuff great amounts into one's stomach. By eating it uncooked, one needs only one-third as much.

If you cook your greens you can eat a lot, but uncooked you can only eat about one-third as much.

And this leads us to a great discovery -- that eating things raw and uncooked contributes substantially to food conservation. A special program on NHK noted that, in the event that food imports were totally halted, even if we made all our golf courses and superhighways into bean and potato fields, still 35 million people would starve to death. But if we ate all our food raw, all those people would be saved. In addition, by eating things raw there would be no leftovers. It is said that in j.a.pan cooked and killed leftovers that are discarded amount to 10 millions tons a year, but if we eat, for example, brown rice and corn uncooked, then there will never be any leftovers.

And even if we converted all our rice paddies to organic production, causing the yield to drop to one-third, there would be no shortage of rice even under present conditions if everyone ate uncooked brown rice.

It Is the City that Needs the Country

So we have seen that, just as I wrote earlier, eating things in their original form, as well as unprocessed and raw, can contribute to the recovery of health. In addition, it will also help conserve food. We will not be troubled in the least when the food imports stop, or when the hospitals and drug companies fold.

What is more, there is yet a third great service done by eating things raw and in their original form: It is possible to become totally independent of the city. When we become independent the city will be in a pickle, but we shall not suffer.

As long as we have hands and feet and a mouth, it is possible for us, just as it is for wild animals, to nourish ourselves without bowls, chopsticks, pots and pans, propane gas, knives, chopping boards, oil, soy sauce, sugar, or even salt.

Wild animals do not take in an especially large amount of salt, and yet I have never heard of wild animals damaging their health because of this. It is only human beings who take in abnormally large quant.i.ties, thereby suffering from arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure. It is said that human beings only require 0.1 grams of salt per day. But j.a.panese on the average take in 20 grams per day, and even those people who are on reduced salt diets ingest 10 grams a day, so this means that we are taking in between 100 and 200 times the needed amount. One-tenth of one gram is an amount naturally found in food, and that should be enough; human beings should not be any different from wild animals. The salt refining factories and the salt retailers can go belly up any time they like. It is idiotic to believe that people must ingest the same proportion of salt as is contained in the blood. One should consider that 0.1 gram of salt has acc.u.mulated in the blood.

If you suddenly reduce the amount of salt you ingest you will experience a kind of "cold turkey" in which you feel tired, but this is just because the body is used to a lot of salt. If you put up for just one week, it will pa.s.s. One should require no warmup even in order to reduce one's salt intake to 1/100th of the usual.

We have therefore seen the city's last bastion of control -- salt -- crumble before our very eyes. We do not need the city at all in order to live. It is the city that needs the country in order to continue its existence.

Chapter VI Notes

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The cause of the city's demise will be, for example, a lack of resources, the insufficiency of food, or the contamination of the environment. However, this all depends much upon the changes surrounding the city, so perhaps one should say that the city will perish from "without." Still, the ent.i.ty responsible for engendering this cause from without is none other than the city (it is the city which squanders resources, brings ruin upon the farming villages, and contaminates the environment), so I think it is correct to say that the city will perish "automatically."

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Buddhist monk and poet (1118-1190). (Translator's note)

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