AmicaCarmilla

Yesterday my caring husband brought home a leaflet about a new macrobiotic cafe in Primrose Hill. Joy! I used to go to the macrobiotic restaurant in my uni city and was so pleased to discover that a branch also opened in my parents' holiday town. I ate there with them in August, and we all enjoyed the quality and simplicity of the well balanced dishes. I explicitly observed that this was a big gap in the UK market and it would be far more popular in avan-garde London than it is in traditional Italy. They couldn't find a better spot than the hippie-chic community of Primrose Hill, a few feet away from one of the most popular yoga centres in town. The idea of macrobiotic cuisine is to reach an equilibrium between the yin and the yang. Some people may find it a bit tasteless, as it was initially developed as a curative nutritional regime, but it has now been developed into a preventive cuisine. "Yang is the initiating impulse, which divides and delineates; yin is the responsive impulse, which nurtures and reunites. Without yang nothing would come into being; without yin all that comes into being would die. yang is mental activity in its forceful aspect, yin the imaginative and poetic, exalting the merely mental to the beautiful. yang goes ahead with things, yin contains things within herself and knows their nature without effort. yang does, yin is. Yang in his givingness bestows the gifts; yin in her being receives, preserves, enhances, and redistributes them. Yang constructs, yin instructs; yang implements, yin complements; yang is strength, yin endurance; yang is knowledge, yin the mystery that reveals itself and becomes knowledge. yang is the discoverer, yin lures toward greater discovery. Yang is the self-developer, inspired by yin, the self dedicator, for her development and his dedication. Yang is the lover, and yin is therefore beloved; yin is the beloved and the source of love. Yang is will and yin is wisdom, and one without the other is neither, and together they are joy. Yang is as the day, turning into night, and yin the night preceding the day; the one is the force that drives the waves of the ocean forward, the other the force that draws them back so that they may go forward again." "Twin Souls," by Patricia Joudry and Maurie D. Pressman

So, if the saying "we are what we eat is true", all of us should try a bit of macrobiotic delicacies to strengthen the yin in us...