"Mostly" vegetarian since childhood, "basically" macrobiotic since the early 60's, instructor at her own Natural Gourmet Cooking School since 1977, and converted in the early 80's to a five-phase food theory derived from Chinese medicine, the author of Food and Healing and The Book of Whole Meals presents more sugar, free, mostly meatless and dairy-free dishes with a global range (Argentine vegetable stew, Italian bean soup with arugula, Middle Eastern stuffed grape leaves) and a decided Japanese accent. (Her introduction recommends basing one's diet on the whole foods consumed on the continent of one's ancestors--a practice that will limit anyone's use of her book, whatever the ancestral continent.) In themselves, Colbin's recipes represent a fairly sophisticated repertoire of uncomplicated dishes for the "natural gourmet." For those who go in for prescriptive formulas based on Asian principles, she assigns to each dish a major and a minor "phase" (a further refinement on yin and yang) and prescribes a diet balancing the five--but doesn't give the uninitiated much reason for doing so.
