Excerpt
From Chapter Eight: The People’s Republic of China: 1949-Present
Folk Nutritional Therapy in Modern China
Chinese folk nutrition in recent centuries drew on the idea that foods could be heating, cooling, wetting, drying, strengthening, or cleansing. The most important dimensions were heating (re) and cooling (liang; a few foods were cold, han). These concepts developed from a medieval fusion of Chinese ideas of yang and yin, and Hippocratic-Galenic humoral medicine introduced from the Near East (“Galenos” is referenced in one fourteenth-century text). Experience of famine also reinforced the realities of food energy and its importance in maintaining body heat. More recent fieldwork in southeast China shows that managing diet remains the first recourse when responding to illness (Anderson 1988, 1996).
Heating foods included those that were high-calorie, subjected to high heat in cooking, spicy or bitter, or “hot” in color (red, orange). Cooling foods were low-calorie, watery, soothing or sour in taste, or “cool” in color (whitish, green). Cooked grain was considered perfectly balanced, serving as a reference point. In contrast, cool foods treated hot illnesses, which involved sores, reddening, rashes, dry skin, and sore throat—symptoms similar to those of a burn (and illnesses often recognized by biomedicine as involving vitamin C deficiency). Green vegetables were among the most commonly used.
Typical cool conditions involved low body temperature, chills, pallor, weakness, watery eliminations, and symptoms resembling those of hypothermia. Anemia most commonly fit these criteria, as did tuberculosis and recovery from childbirth. Treatment involved easily digested red and organ meats, ginger, Chinese liquor, wolfthorn berries (gou ji zi, Lycium chinense), rich in vitamins and minerals, and similar foods. Such interventions addressed the anemia and alleviated conditions related to excess cool conditions. Heating foods were often eaten simply to maintain body heat. Everyone knew, for example, that eating baked goods or fatty meat on a winter day would keep one warmer than would a diet of vegetables.
Strengthening (bupin, lit. “supplementing” or “patching things”) foods were usually easily digested, nutrient-rich protein foods, like the dark meat of poultry, organ meats, mushrooms, and several herbal foods (Hu 2005). Some specifically strengthened particular organs—usually deriving from organs themselves. For example, pork lungs helped human lungs, liver helped liver, and penises of harem-keeping animals like seals or deer supplemented human male genitalia. Sometimes resemblance was enough: walnut meats strengthened the brain. Red liquids, especially port wine, strengthen the blood. Sometimes, a red fruit like red jujubes, did the same. Black items (from black dog meat to stout beer) often strengthened the body. Food with a gelatinous texture was thought to have special qi and was valued for replenishing yang. Such foods, if high in protein and minerals, were particularly valued: birds’ nests, rare fungi or sea cucumbers, as were less common game animals from tigers to vultures.
Bland to slightly sharp herbs were cleansing (jing), clearing away undesirable moisture, phlegm, impurities, and contamination in the body. Some contained chemicals recognized in biomedicine as antibiotic, astringent, or diuretic. Other foods were “poisonous” (du), in the sense that they potentiated poisons in the body. For example, although live male poultry kept away demons and had other ritual functions, when dead they were thought to exacerbate cancer.