The Healing Essence of Food

Everyone knows food is our daily sustenance.  If we're lucky it tastes good and is presented in an appealing way.  But do you know food has been used throughout the millennia to heal?  Perhaps your Hungarian grandmother has a bone soup recipe traditionally used after childbirth, or maybe your Chinese uncle has a special cold remedy made with ginger that was passed down through the generations in his family.  All cultures have some recipes whose purpose moves beyond the mundane act of eating to relieve hunger into the healing domain.  This aspect of food transcends calories, carbohydrates and vitamins and is all about its healing essence.  What exactly is the healing essence of food? 

Everything carries a particular "energy" that has a special vibration.  This vibration resonates with any similar one and allows for a kind of "transfer" of the specific energy between them.  The phrase "Like goes with like" gets at the heart of this concept.  And it is this quality in food–the essence of any particular food–that conveys its healing benefits.  Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has long understood how the essence of every food travels to one or more organs and their meridians (energy pathways), nourishing, healing and balancing them.  That is why TCM has always prescribed certain foods as part of its healing strategy.  The following traditional Taoist maxim perfectly illustrates this principle:

Food is better than herbs,
Qi is better than food, and
Emptiness is better than Qi.

Moving below the surface of these words to reach their true meaning, we see that it is all about prevention, a fundamental TCM healing approach.  This means it is far better to eat well than to have to visit the doctor and get herbs once your health has been compromised.  What you do on a daily basis can accumulate to yield many healing benefits.  Conversely, negative habits can erode your health day by day over time.  "Qi" refers to vital energy as in Qigong, a system to build and balance your internal energy, and emptiness, the greatest health enhancer of all, is a state where you are in total flow with everything, open to all the healing energies of the universe.  What can possibly bother you then?

TCM understands that our energy comes from two main sources:  energy we inherit from our parents and ancestors and what we gain from food.  This underscores the importance of a balanced approach to eating.  According to TCM wisdom, this means including foods in your diet that correspond to the specific energy of the season.  In spring the Liver and Gallbladder are in predominance and the associated "taste" of the season is sour.  Foods that nurture this organ pair include broccoli, dandelion greens, eggplant, pickles, garlic and scallions.  So dig in!  Eating foods right now that have an essence that resonates with these organs can help heal them naturally.