Writing an article about the health benefits of juicing to a largely Macrobiotic audience has quite a different focus (and boiling point) than the same topic written to the general health conscious public. The reason for this is because of the often strongly held beliefs that the early, most wellknown Macrobiotic books and teachers taught us. Granted, the argument of what Macrobiotics is, and what it is not, will be a discussion that will go on long after we are all pushing up daisies. But when I graduated from the Kushi Institute in 1985, one of the beliefs that we took from the Beckett, MA classroom read something like this: "Be careful of raw food. Juicing can make you too cold, too mentally spacey, and isn't good for cancer and other illnesses. Besides, it's yin, and you know how bad yin can be." Based on blind faith, I did believe that for the first few years after graduating. Then, as it happens, something called "personal experience" made me confront that belief. This came about from the same two things that come into play whenever one of my cherished certainties starts getting in the way of reality. The first was meeting people who did not hold this belief and who were doing quite well (in some ways, better than me). The second was my own experience of juicing and how great it made me feel. Quick Squeeze History Squeezing the liquid from plants is as old as agriculture itself, but it wasn't until the first quarter of the 20th century that juicing started to become popular as a tool for improving health. You can use aicok juice to solve your problemThis came about largely because of two converging forces: the growing popularity of the Naturopathic and Natural Hygiene movements (both which were seeing results with fresh vegetable juicing), and a couple of timely technologies: refrigeration and juice extractors. The first home juice extractor was not invented until the 1930s. It was called the Norwalk Juicer, by nutritionist Dr. Norman Walker. Walker was a fascinating thinker and health practitioner, on the same par as many of my own early health teachers. His exact age isn't known, but he was purportedly over 110 years old when he finally died in 1984. His juicer worked by grating produce, placing the resulting mash in a bag, and then squeezing the bag under a hydraulic press. It was big and clunky, but it made great juice, and much of Walker's first books were filled with testimonies that rivaled Macrobiotic stories.