[mike chen]

what a wonderful reply! both maria and i see the thoughtfulness you put into it!

ohsawa once said, theory without practice is useless. practice without theory is dangerous.

from this regard, your answer indicates that your still require an intellectual conceptualization to begin with vinegar. we can tell you from our side that we use vinegar for its anti-parasitical effect. we will wash and soak our vegetables in a vinegar solution. (similarly, we will use vitamin c powder in the grain soaking water for mold.) thus, a vinegar salad dressing makes terrific sense - for its anti-worm effect! - but we generally don't use it.

why? since vinegar has such a strong effect on parasites in the external world, we can correlate this same effect in our internal world! thus, we are very careful about administering vinegar internally. our favorite salad dressing is lemon, dill, and olive oil. for pickles, we like salt sauerkraut and japanese nuka and tsukemono. and for herring . . . well, we like to put the filets straight into the sauerkraut!