myOtaku.com: shiroikarasu

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Birthday
• 1990-06-13
Gender
• Female
Location
• MD, USA
Member Since
• 2003-08-03
Occupation
• DES's hikari
Real Name
• Tory (Dori, Tostito)

Personal

Achievements
• A lot, not that they matter. Anime Club President/Fuhrer till the end of this year.
Anime Fan Since
• (age 4) Tonari No Totoro
Favorite Anime
• Gravitation, Weiss Kreuz, Hagaren (FMA), Kino No Tabi, .hack, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann
Goals
• To go on an insane shopping spree in Tokyo sometime soon. Gosurori...
Hobbies
• Drooling. Over many things.
Talents
• I make a mean ramen, mm!

myOtaku.com: shiroikarasu

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Japanese Food = Alchemy?
So every day at work we get emails called "Media Monitoring" which list all of Whole Foods' appearances in written media across the nation. In this batch there was an article about Japanese food theory, washoku. It was a very interesting read, in my opinion, and you can find the whole thing here, probably at some point...after this post. Search for "Sushi USA" and choose the 6/19 article.

Anyway, while I gleaned a great deal of information from the article, the one thing that struck me most was one of the principles of washoku, based upon Buddhist practice. Washoku "suggests that each meal should contain five different colors, primary tastes (sweet, salty, etc.), textures and cooking preparations." Here's the bit that really intrigued me: "...washoku meals always display the five colors red, green, yellow, white and black."
If that doesn't mean anything to you, I shall quote another source. "Base metals were transformed in a series of stages, called operations, the last of which produced the Stone. ... Each operation led to a change, marked by an alteration in color, from black to white to yellow, and finally red. (Interim colors such as green or the transient hues symbolized by the peacock's tail were also sometimes present.)" Hmm. How odd. Red, yellow, black, white, green... Also, if you don't think the case for green is strong enough, it is the traditional color of the prima materia, the base substance of which all things are made. So how did this colorful connection likely come about?
My brief and simple hypothesis is that, since alchemy was developed in a number of different parts of the world, from Egypt to India to China, different concepts in the general conglomeration of alchemical facts, symbols, etc. today come from different cultures. For instance, the original god presiding over alchemy was Hermes (also Mercury, since the Romans stole their religion from the Greeks, and Egyptian Thoth is related to him as well); most words used in relation to alchemy are Latin (albido, opus magnum, prima materia); the Emerald Tablet is possibly based in an Arabic text called Kitab Sirr al-Asar. It is entirely possible, and in my opinion likely, that the five colors present in the creation of the Philosopher's Stone originated from the same source as Buddhism, which influenced Japanese food. Tadaa!
Any questions?
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