Some knowledge does not arrive through reasoning. It arrives through attention.
In the Meiji era, a Japanese army physician named Sagen Ishizuka developed a framework for understanding the relationship between food and the body — at a time when the scientific vocabulary to support it barely existed. He classified foods by opposition: yin and yang, sea and land, above ground and below. From these simple pairings, he drew conclusions about how human beings ought to eat.
Where this certainty came from is not recorded. What is known is that his intuition was later systematized by George Ohsawa into what became Macrobiotics — and that it spread through Europe and America before it was widely recognized in Japan itself.
Remove additives, preservatives, and chemically derived flavourings from your diet, and something predictable happens: the palate quiets. Flavours become subtler. And then, gradually, what was always there begins to be audible — the actual taste of the food itself. Seasonal ingredients, in particular, become vivid in a way they were not before.
This is a question of sensitivity. Reduce the noise, and signals that were always present become perceptible.
What Ishizuka perceived may not have been theory at all. He lived in an era before the palate was systematically overwhelmed — when the body’s capacity to receive information from food had not yet been compromised. Like a craftsman who demonstrates precision without explaining it, he may simply have known through the body what the body was designed to know.
To eat without attention — to consume whatever is placed in front of you, flavoured by additives and preserved by chemicals — is not merely a dietary choice. It is a form of sensory withdrawal. The signal is still there. The question is whether the receiver has been kept capable of receiving it.
But what the body knows about food is only the beginning of what it knows.
The next layer runs deeper — and it does not belong to you alone.
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