You’re itinerary‘s perfection, car, hotel, entertainment, sight-seeing, including plenty of local color. But are you macro-ready? Am I what? Yep, are you prepared to eat well and within macrobiotic diet recommendations while away from your macrobiotic kitchen?

There are a few parts to this puzzle. It’s do-able, easy, and well worth it. Why? Because you’ll feel 100% better on your travels, and keep your direction of health at the same time. Avoid jet lag, sleep well, and be up to all the sightseeing and visiting you’ve planned. We actually give a complete macrobiotic cooking class on this subject. Here are a few pointers.

Take your most important macrobiotic items with you! Lino Stanchich, our first macrobiotic counselor, use to say always be prepared. You never know what items will be difficult to find when you are away.

This was before the present restrictions on flying. We use to take more with us, in the original bottles and jars. We once packed a suitcase with 84 pounds of just our food when visiting Fred’s brother in Monaco. No more. Car trips afford luxurious space so we pack the minimum size of all our macrobiotic essentials: shoyu, ume plum, miso, kuzu, si salt, etc. But on the plane we strictly travel with carry-on luggage. We may take a small eye dropper bottle of shoyu to insure we have the best quality, and teeny jars of miso and ume plum as well. The Container Store sells these for minimal charge. 

Google and email ahead to your destination to find local health stores, and contact them for products are availability. If staying in a facility permitting cooking – a suite hotel perhaps, or condo, you’re in like flint. Purchase your organic or bio veggies, prepare breakfast, and maybe rice balls to add to your lunch. Then a divine dinner at a special restaurant – you’re on vacation!

Use this easy way to cook in a thermos. Even on an airplane, you can carry an empty open wide-mouth thermos. Measure your grain in 1 cup portions: brown rice, quinoa, bulghur and yes, go ahead add the pinch of si salt. Put this measurement into a small wax paper bag, fold, and slide these into a plastic baggie. Brown rice -short, medium and long – should be rinsed, roasted til dry, and let cool before bagging. The other mentioned grains can be measured out without roasting.

So it’s now as easy as boiling water to make your grain. Just bring 1 1/2 cups water to boil, place the grain the thermos, pour in the water, and tomorrow morning you have delicious grain. We actually take 2 thermos with us: one for breakfast, and one for lunch.

Enjoy breakfast on your balcony, or join others in the bed and breakfast area, and you’re off and running for the day! No guilt about keeping a great macrobiotic regime! And the best benefit – you’re tiptop condition for the demands of travel!

Remember, what a meal is! Warren Kramer teaches a meal is a grain or grain product and a vegetable! Carrying kukicha tea bags with you is a great idea to end your meal. A bit us of wild caught fish is very nice, and often you can enjoy the local specialty as well, avoiding farm-raised fish.

What about ordering, when you don’t speak the language! Research the macrobiotic avoid words before you travel, and carry these with you on a typed, laminated wallet-size card. Duplicate this list to hand the person taking your order, and no worries about cheese, butter, milk being added to your cuisine! Relax and enjoy the ambiance. Bon voyage ! !

In 1992 I had a triple bypass operation after one large heart attack, and 34 smaller ones at the hospital following medication to stop that big one. This left me very weak and I decided then and there to do all I could to heal myself. Most importantly, change the life style that had brought on this life-threatening crisis. And eliminate taking medications which eventually weaken the heart and other organs.

First I enrolled in St. Joseph Hospital’s cardiac rehab program, which continued at a great health club. In a matter of 2 months I became amazingly fit. Marsha had discovered Dr. Ornish’s book “How To Reverse Heart Disease Without Surgery and we followed the diet he recommended for 6 months, attending his November seminar in Berkeley.

March, 1993 we met up in Florida with Senior Macrobiotic Counselor, Lino Stanchich, attended his lecture which rang so true to me. I had my private consultation with him the next day, and decided to follow the macrobiotic diet he recommended specifically modified to heal myself completely. Marsha took macrobiotic cooking classes, and within 2 months on the program a test at cardiac rehab showed my fat content was the lowest they had ever measured. Down to 8% – equal to that of an athlete.

The Macrobiotic Diet I have found is very empowering. It’s a diet of energetics. Proper cooking style and selection of foods attuned me to my real dietary needs. Initially it was Marsha doing most of the cooking. She truly improved her cooking skills by studying at the Kushi Institute, and initially I assisted her as the macro dishwasher. But in time and assisting with Macrobiotic cooking teachers we brought to our home since 1993, such as Wendy Esko and Warren Kramer, I became quite comfortable with preparing Macrobiotic cuisine. Ready to doing my own exploits.

As my health improved, business travel took me to the New York area 4-5 days, almost weekly. Cooking breakfast and lunch each morning at the hotel, I was able to keep the menu Ed Esko suggested for my macrobiotic recommendations. I even developed a program which I called Macro on the Go – a class I taught 3 years at The Kushi Summer Conference. I introduced myself saying, I’m not a macrobiotic counselor, or teacher – I’m just a traveling business man. We even sold travel kits and demo’ed my suitcase set-up full of cookers, pots and utensils! My classes were always popular, and many folks said this helped them immensely.

Recently I have been assisting Marsha more intensely the last couple of years in our Macrobiotic Cooking Service. We prepare 2 macrobiotic meals-to-go daily Monday through Saturday for our clients. And have fun doing this together. In the beginning Marsha’s high standards kept her correcting me often. But that’s why I love her. And I prefer being part of everything being top knotch for our guests.

Now I am proud to say my specialty is Kinpira Soup. And for those of you knowing this dish, that’s a lot of precise matchstick cutting. My Swiss background embraces this cuisine beautifully with exacting knife-manship! Marsha adores my Miso soup best; she says my sweetness gets into the soup, and if we ever made it the exactly the same, mine would be sweeter than hers.

Maybe that’s part of the fun in our macrobiotic kitchen. It’s more than a dish, more than a diet. It’s the romance. That’s the ticket. Marsha always says our kitchen is really a dance floor that just happens to have a stove in the middle of it. And it’s not unusual we find ourselves dancing at some point in the meal preparation.