I’ve found a lot of health wisdom in the centuries-old Japanese food tradition of Washoku. It’s a surprisingly little-known concept outside of Japan; some people associate it with elaborate kaiseki at Japanese restaurants. But that’s just the fine dining version.
There are simpler ways to bring a Washoku approach into our lives — and we might consider it. Japan has the world’s lowest rates of heart disease and most chronic diseases, and consequently the longest-lived people. The US obesity rate (2017) is 41.9%; Japan’s is 3.7%—these two countries represent the high and low for developed countries.
Washoku’s holistic principles and practices can be applied to any cuisine, and they get us away from restrictive diets that micromanage calories and macros. We restore a peaceful relationship with food and discover sustainable nutrition.
How does it work? Although traditional Washoku is often boiled down to rules about five colors, five flavors, five methods, five senses, and five attitudes, there are meaningful health practices hidden within the shorthand of those “fives.” From a nutritionist’s standpoint, Washoku naturally results in a plant-forward, real-food diet and “crowding-out” mechanism that prioritizes nutrition density and diversity. Ingredient diversity honors bioindividuality, supplying each of us with enough macro nutrients, vitamins, and minerals for our bodies’ unique needs. Over time, this can’t help but give us our optimal weight and hormone balance.
Yet Washoku is so much more than eating for nutritional outcomes. It encourages us to make ample space in our lives for cooking, connecting us to nature, to our past, and to our present — to all the people we cook with and eat with. Washoku gives us a framework for mindfulness, feeding a spirit of gratitude, community, and caregiving.
Washoku has made me more aware of the wider processes of healing through food. In the end, cooking is a creative and intuitive act, and each person will engage with Washoku traditions differently. Here are 15 principles that I’ve embraced.
5 Colors
I list this one first because it's possibly the easiest healthy-eating instinct to develop. Once you start, it's difficult to not see a meal in terms of colors. (Or lack of! I often struggle finding yellows.)
By including five colors of whole foods in your meals —red, yellow, green, brown/black, and white—you can’t help but eat a diverse and balanced plant-forward diet rich in the vast variety of minerals and micronutrients that your body needs. This checklist version of “eat the rainbow” is a simple way to help you develop the right instincts.
Color is nutrition. Three major classes of phytochemicals exist in colored foods: carotenoids (yellow to red), chlorophylls (green), and anthocyanins (blue, purple, and red). Anthocyanins are a particular type of flavonoid within the polyphenol family, important antioxidants.
If you eat colorfully, you will naturally arrive at ingredient diversity, which is so foundational to Japanese food culture that government programs recommend eating 30 different foods a day. This makes sense when you consider food as preventative medicine. No single antioxidant can replace the combination of natural phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables to achieve the health benefits. So make your meals colorful.
5 Tastes
Balance the basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy. In food preparation, no one flavor should overwhelm the others. And this doesn't only apply to sauces and seasonings. Whole foods have inherent taste profiles. Some examples:
Sweet – legumes, grains, corn, potatoes, squash, cabbage, carrots, fruits
Sour – vinegar, lemon, fermented vegetables
Salty – salt, soy sauce, miso, seaweed
Bitter – kale, collards, parsley, mustards, celery
Spicy/pungent – ginger, garlic, onions, radish, spices
Sour – vinegar, lemon, fermented vegetables
Salty – salt, soy sauce, miso, seaweed
Bitter – kale, collards, parsley, mustards, celery
Spicy/pungent – ginger, garlic, onions, radish, spices
In Japanese ancient medicine, Kampo, each taste nourishes a specific organ or system. The more you include a variety of tastes, the more fortifying meals will be for your entire body. Sometimes just a small amount of a “taste” — as in a bite of salty pickle, a bitter leaf of parsley, or tang of pepper—can contribute significantly to an organ’s health. Alternatively, excess can weaken it.
Aim for a full range of tastes in your meals, and you'll support all your organs.
5 Ways
This principle might be called Many Small Plates. Washoku asks us to prepare food for a meal in five different ways: steaming, simmering, grilling or roasting, oil frying, and preparing raw foods.
5 Ways is a challenge for busy people. This principle demands our time and creative attention in planning and making a balanced and diverse meal. In Japanese cuisine, it can be seen in ichi-ju-san-sai, “one soup and three dishes,” plus, of course, rice. In other cultures, it might be tapas or small plates.
While it’s tempting to dismiss 5 Ways as outdated or too onerous, there is value sometimes in choosing the opposite of quick and easy. This principle asks us to slow down and make more space for cooking, not less. Even today’s Japanese Dietetic Association guidelines advise: “Eat well-balanced meals with staple food, main dishes and side dishes. Combine various foods. Cook meals in various ways.”
So how to do it?
In the spirit of Washoku, choose 5 Ways—but make them your own. I often skip a fried food but try always to include as sides a fermented food, a pickled vegetable, and a raw one. You can create diversity in many ways.
I found that setting out an array of small bowls and plates makes things easier. But bowl meals are another way to go about it.
Focus on Seasons
Seasonality looms large throughout Washoku, which calls for meals to include a shun ingredient, meaning “at peak seasonality” for flavor and nutrition. Anyone with a vegetable garden knows the singular experience of a shun tomato in August.
Ancient medicine traditions teach that basing a diet on shun ingredients ensures our body gets the specific nourishment it needs when it needs it, because our bodies’ needs change throughout the seasons. Ayurvedic, TCM, and Kampo all discourage eating winter produce when it is summer, or summer food when it is winter. Human bodies evolved eating with the seasons—far longer than we’ve been grocery shopping at mega markets with everything available all the time.
Additionally, there’s a poetic wistfulness and appreciation for nature in the concept of shun that embraces the fleetingness of time through seasonal foods. Japan’s traditional calendar marks 72 micro-seasons, mostly around the growing of food, and so there’s a lot of shun to keep track of.
30 Ingredients
One of the most important goals of Washoku food culture is a diverse and balanced diet. During the 1980s, the Japanese government became concerned by the Westernization of the Japanese diet, and the effects it was having on its famously healthy population. So the government made Washoku food culture and principles part of school curriculum at every level.
Students are taught to aim for 30 different ingredients a day, to help them lean into a traditional washoku diet. And to balance their nutrition, they should select from each of these food groups: MA GO WA YA SA SHI. “Grandchildren are kind” (mago wa yasashii) is the mnemonic used to teach the seven food groups.
Here are the seven food groups, according to MA GO WA YA SA SHI I: beans such as natto, tofu, miso, adzuki (MAme ), sesame and other seeds and nuts (GOma), sea vegetables such as nori and kombu (WAkame), leafy greens and root vegetables (YAsai), fish and seafood (SAkana), fungi (SHIitake), and sweet potatoes and taro (Imo).
Students are taught to aim for 30 different ingredients a day, to help them lean into a traditional washoku diet. And to balance their nutrition, they should select from each of these food groups: MA GO WA YA SA SHI. “Grandchildren are kind” (mago wa yasashii) is the mnemonic used to teach the seven food groups.
Here are the seven food groups, according to MA GO WA YA SA SHI I: beans such as natto, tofu, miso, adzuki (MAme ), sesame and other seeds and nuts (GOma), sea vegetables such as nori and kombu (WAkame), leafy greens and root vegetables (YAsai), fish and seafood (SAkana), fungi (SHIitake), and sweet potatoes and taro (Imo).
Another way to add balance is through the concept of umi no sachi, yama no sachi: “bounty of the sea and bounty of the land.” This could be as simple as sea salt and vegetables, fish and potatoes, or rice and nori.
The 5 Colors, 5 Tastes, and 5 Ways encourage diversity and balance. Eating plants seed to root to leaf to flower is another way.
Participate Fully
This implicit attitude from Washoku shows up in the Japan Dietetic Association guidelines: “participate in preparation of meals.” Yet I think we can define participation better than just helping to chop the vegetables.
When you grow backyard vegetables, you learn quickly that how we nourish our food affects how our food nourishes us. Look for opportunities to engage with food systems and deepen your connection to nature. And don’t think you need a farm to participate fully in your food. Caring for a summer herb pot in your window lets you trace your meal to sun and soil. Burying vegetable scraps outside or adding them to a green bin to create compost makes your home part of a circular economy.
We can also broaden our participation in gathering and preparing. By picking a token dandelion leaf or two to garnish a plate, we recognize abundance around us. By buying whole chicken and cutting it into pieces, we remember the bird. By grinding wheat berries into flour, we see the plants in our breads. .
A Light Hand
It’s true that seasonings and sauces can make whole foods more interesting, but make sure those cooking choices don’t get in the way of the spirit of the food. Perhaps nuts are eaten by themselves, simply toasted to gently warm their oils. Certainly salad dressings need a considered hand. In a salad of fresh spring greens and carrots, carrots might be lightly dressed and softened by a vinaigrette but not the sweet, tender leaves.
Celebrate the essence of an ingredient when turning it into a dish: sozai wo ikasu, “let the raw ingredients express themselves.” With so much focus on seasonality and freshness, it makes sense to serve ingredients at their peak as naturally as possible. We can reawaken our taste for different vegetables by preparing them simply and letting them stand on their own.
Choose Local
Whenever it’s feasible, eat what grows around you. Learn about the wild foods that thrive wherever you happen to be. Know the artisan food producers in your community.
This is the principle that puts the “ish” in Washoku-ish. Because Washoku will look different depending on where you live.
Japan’s long history of regional food systems and religious rites around harvests are embedded in its food culture. That means place-based ingredients and regional culinary creations are highly prized. To visit a place is to sample its local foods.
Eating locally ensures that you will eat foods in season, at the height of flavor and nutrition. Building meals around local foods shows you your place in a circular economy, connecting you to your environment and to the gifts and needs of your community.
Where I live, I wait patiently for the nettles to pop up each spring. The blackberries and huckleberries arrive in August. And while I’ve never been quicker than the squirrels to find hazelnuts—I know they’re there. These weedy survivors are treasures I can't get in a grocery store.
Visiting my mother’s house, I always take time to squeeze her backyard limes and lemons, freeze the juice, and lug it back home with me. Any time I use her lime juice, I’m connected to my childhood home. Wherever I travel, I bring home local products. Cooking with them reconnects me to those memories and those communities.
Lots of Plants
Buddhist and Shinto influences can be seen in Washoku’s plant-forward diet: seed to root to stalk to leaf to flower. A traditional Japanese breakfast looks identical to a dinner in many respects involving a riot of colorful seasonal vegetables—fresh, cooked, fermented, salt pickled—along with steamed rice and other local grains. There will be tofu and fermented soybeans; adequate protein to break the sleeping fast and help maintain healthy glucose.
To be sure, it is impossible to cook in a Washoku style without embracing plants and everything they offer, whatever your cuisine of choice.
This expansive way of approaching the vegetable section of the grocery store might be a significant change for some. Learning how to store and prepare vast varieties of fresh plant foods does represent challenges. But only good things can come from making more room in our kitchens and on our plates for plants.
Nothing Wasted
The idea of mottai-nai, “regret for wastefulness,” in Japanese food culture can be seen in finishing a bowl of rice to the last grain, honoring an ancient past in which the rice harvest was life. In the kitchen, we can practice ichi motsu zen shoku, “one food, used entirely,” which encourages using all parts of plants: seeds, roots, stems, leaves, flowers.
In some ways, this idea of nothing wasted is the most creative aspect of cooking. It’s easy to follow a recipe when you have all the ingredients. But finding uses for what you already have is a delicious puzzle.
Making coconut milk out of dried coconut leaves behind fluffy white fiber, which gently dried in the oven becomes coconut flour. Kale and collard stems stand in for asparagus. Carrot ends, celery tops, parsley stems, and onions’ tough outer layers all go into the freezer for later use to make stock. Blanching liquid from greens and vegetables become cooking liquid for grains. There are endless ways to eat it all.
Connect to Nature
Nature is the basis of washoku food culture. We often choose cooking methods for an ingredient that bring us close to nature, cutting vegetables root to leaf or blanching to enhance natural color and taste. We bring reminders of nature inside and onto our tables.
We show respect for nature when we protect her systems. Choosing organics — foods grown within Earth's natural systems — is one way to honor nature. Eating foods in season also protects nature. When we buy wild fish in season, when it is most plentiful, we are receiving it when it is offered and not when it is scarce. In Seattle, we can buy grapes from Chile in December—but should we? We don’t have to contribute to the demand that causes grapes to be flown around the world at great cost to the Earth.
The idea of protecting nature’s systems includes protecting our bodies’ natural systems.
Because it is impossible to “eat clean” in a modern world, we need to respect our liver and kidneys and other systems that compensate for what even supposedly healthy whole foods inflict: even the freshest fish has been exposed to pollution, even organic fruits have been bred to be high in fructose, even fiber-rich whole grains are high in gluten and barely resemble their wild ancestors. Knowing how hard our organs work dealing with toxins, mutating cells, inflammation and things we cannot easily help in a modern world, maybe don’t burden them also with cheezits.
The food we eat presents itself in all the cells of our bodies. So the smart way to use the “food as medicine” concept is to treat any food as either harming or healing. Bathe your body in as many nutritious foods as possible to keep its systems topped up with immune health. Heal your liver and kidneys and pancreas and heart and brain at every meal.
Gratitude
There are many prescriptive attitudes embedded in Washoku, and kansha, “appreciation,” describes perhaps the most important one to bring to the table.
To give voice to the understanding that we are sustained by nature’s bounty and by other people, we express gratitude before the first bite: itadakimasu, “I humbly receive this.” This acknowledges the ingredients as well as all lives involved in bringing it to the table—farmer, grocer, cook. Make this such a habit that you mutter it under your breath even when no one else is around. And afterward, gochisosama-deshita, a hyper respectful “thank you.”
And what is the true power of gratitude? When it is genuinely felt, it opens the door to the resulting attitude of obligation. We should feel the urge to be worthy of the food that nourishes us and of the hands that brought it to our table. Go forth and be worthy. Support your people. Give back. Do good works.
Slow Down
We can learn to enjoy the anticipation of a delicious meal. And when we eat, reflect on hara hachi bun me, “80 percent full.” Most of us have no idea what 80 percent full feels like, though we do know what stuffed feels like. Perhaps we need more contemplation on what is enough? We will need to slow down to hear “not hungry.”
Nutritionists say it can take more than a dozen meals to reset stomach muscle memory and get used to less food. Once you do that, though, you can start fine-tuning communication with your stomach.
Eat slowly, chewing completely. Listen to your body. Don’t eat just because it’s noon. Don’t eat when you're not hungry. Maybe you’re just thirsty. Maybe you need a nap. Maybe you need a walk in the fresh air.
When we are healthy, we can eat intuitively. Intuitive eating will naturally result in a healthy hunger schedule, an intermittent fasting that resets hormones, lets your liver catch up with its work, and lets cells clean house. Hunger prepares us to receive a nutritious meal.
Acts of Love
Through food, we can show a nourishing spirit for our own health and happiness as well as for others’. Growing, sourcing, and preparing food to nourish body and soul is immense labor—yet empowering. Research shows cooking from scratch at home is directly proportional to lower rates of obesity and chronic diseases. That means longer lives spent in good health. And surprisingly, studies show that it doesn't matter what healthy diet you're following; if you’re cooking at home, you're going to be healthier than people who don’t.
Whatever else is not working for your health, you can always cook. You can always improve how you feed yourself. Cooking is self-care. Love yourself with your food choices.
By extension, cooking is a way to care for our friends and family. Selecting the most shun ingredients, preparing the most nourishing dishes, and sitting down to eat in peace and gratitude with others are daily opportunities to manifest love.
Omotenashi is the Japanese way of treating a guest with a welcoming, nourishing spirit. Cooking for others is one way this manifests, with genuine concern for health and happiness. The motivation is perhaps grounded in ichigo ichie, “one time, one meeting,” a philosophy that suggests we should be present in all moments and consider every encounter as singular.
A related concept is kyoshoku, “sharing a meal with family and friends.” Research suggests many health benefits of eating as part of social and communal events.
There is a whiteboard in our house where I have jotted down food allergies, dislikes, and favorites for friends and family. Planning a meal starts with considering that list. Another part of graceful hosting involves time. If I’mm scrambling to cook, I'm not being present. Finding ways to be so organized and prepared that I can relax and engage while cooking is something I am still working on.
5 Senses
We’ve all heard that we should “eat mindfully,” but that’s a fairly vague idea. Washoku offers a possible framework: eating with all our senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
Notice the smells, tastes, and textures, yes, but also sounds — wind, rain, birds — and consider what those all bring to the taste experience. Winter or summer, open a window for better connection to nature. Eat outside when the first sunny morning of spring arrives.
My Washoku sensei, cookbook author Elizabeth Andoh, told me she teaches students at her culinary school to cook with their 5 senses as well. Listening and smelling are important cues to use in cooking, as well as touching, tasting, and seeing.
Eating with our eyes asks us to treat presentation as an important ingredient. The color and shape and arrangement of serving dishes matters for Japanese foods: square plates are for sashimi and tempura, for example, and rectangle plates are for grilled things. In our own cooking, we can extend culinary creativity to include how best to serve each of the meal’s components.
When you put all your senses to work as part of a meal and place yourself in the present moment, you create a singular experience to savor and linger over, a delicious meditation. Ichigo Ichie.