The Beat Goes On with James Udesky
This website is dedicated to the joy of working with and eating macrobiotic foods and in singing and
My foray into music began as a youth, and dedication to natural foods at about the age of 18.
I aim to use this as a forum to promote Soba making, natural foods manufacturing, healthy eating, music (my songs) as well as other topics of natural lifestyle (sports, out-of-doors, yoga, clothing etc.)
I was born in Chicago, Illinois, grew up in Winnetka, travelled to California in the early 1970's, to study macrobiotics (brown rice, miso soup, mochi, tofu, vegetable eating and production) from Noboru Muramoto (Author of "Healing Ourselves") and voluntarily worked to establish the Herb T. Co. and Asunaro Institute for 4-years and with Herman and Cornellia Aihara The Do of Cooking (pronounciation as in Judo/Aikido, meaning, THE WAY) , at their "Vega Institute" (I have a song that I wrote during my stay there, that I'll upload!
During this time, I met William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi authors of The Book of Tofu, The Book of Miso who were in their zeolous period of sharing their knowledge to Americans by travelling cross-country and giving Tofu/Miso lectures. Meeting all these people, and being active in the Herb T. Co, Rising Sun Natural Foods store in the pre-Whole Foods days was like being a young renegade paving my way of understanding. Very electric, passionate, dynamic people with a vision.
I decided to travel to Japan (as William had done to enlighten himself concering Tofu/Miso in mid 70's to see if there wasn't something else to discover. I was making MOCHI with Muramoto Sensei in our kitchen in San Bruno, before the Top of the World Ranch opening of "Asunaro Institute" (which lasted a year or two), and which offered month long live in classes teaching how to make miso, tofu, and other foods from scratch. Koji making, soy bean cooking, combining with salt, etc.
As a youth growing up in the suburb of Winnetka, Illinois and summertimes at a Madison sports Camp Indianola for 6 years in a row (8-weeks) (our days here are too few), I played/competed in all sports (baseball, basketball, tennis, swimming, golf, gymnastics with a passion), simultaneously engaging my passion for music (trombone, guitar, piano, singing) when the weather was bad (about 50% of the time in the midwestern USA!) :)
I focused on larger scale production of mochi (which I was crazy about at the time), miso, tofu, natto, soy sauce, and others. I met up with te-uchi soba (high quality hand made soba) at a small shop in Tokyo, and decided to enter into volunteer status at several shops.