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 Japan 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 quantities, thereby suffering from arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure. It is said that human beings only require 0.1 grams of salt per day. But Japanese 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 accumulated 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 pass. 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.