Somewhere in this long title should appear the word "macrobiotic" so that people who are not interested could avoid buying the book!Macrobiotic food is boring and even though often it has no meat or dairy, it is by no means similar to the lush and mouthwatering vegetarian or vegan food.The book is huge so I thought I would get a bit from my money and I tried several of the recipes... to results from mildly disastrous to really bad. I've been a vegetarian for more than 15 years and can usually cook to the applause of meat-eating friends so I don't think the fault was mine...As someone else said, if you a vegetarian and looking for a book with lots of recipes... don't bother with this one. My advice: buy any book from the Moosewood restaurant (just type "Moosewood" in the book search, Amazon has most of them), they're huge, creative and delicious and the recipes are flawless.