Natures Cottage

I just started reading the “Chinese System of Food Cures, Prevention & Remedies” by Henry C. Lu today. Here are some interesting excerpts from the book:

Five Flavors of Food
The five flavors of food include pungent (acrid), sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.

Pungent foods include green onion, chives, cloves, parsley, and coriander.
Sweet foods include sugar, cherry, chestnut, and banana.
Sour foods include lemon, pear, plum, and mango.
Bitter foods include hops, lettuce, radish leaf, and vinegar (I list vinegar as bitter because the Chinese call vinegar “bitter wine”. Vinegar tastes both sour and bitter; it is common for some foods to have two simultaneous flavors.)
Salty foods include salt, kept, and seaweed.

The flavors of food are important in Chinese diet, because different flavors have their respective important effects upon the internal organs. Food that have a pungent flavor can act on the lungs and large intestine; foods with a sweet flavor on the stomach and spleen; with sour flavor on the liver and gall bladder; with a bitter flavor on the heart and small intestine; foods that have a salty flavor can act on the kidneys and bladder.

At the beginning, some foods with obvious flavors found to act on some internal organs perform specific actions in the human body. The basic relationships between flavors and internal organs and the actions are studied and analyzed by a process in science called the inductive method. As time goes on, other foods whose flavors are more difficult to determine may be found capable of active upon some internal organs and performing some specific actions.

In general, the common action of foods in regard to their flavors are as follows:

Pungent foods (ginger, green onion, and peppermint) can induce perspiration and promote energy circulation.

Sweet foods (honey, sugar, and watermelon) can slow down the acute symptoms and neutralize the toxic effects of other foods.

Sour foods (lemon and plum) can obstruct the movements, and are useful, therefore, in checking diarrhea and excessive perspiration.

Bitter foods, reduce body heat, dry body fluids, and induce diarrhea (which is why many Chinese herbs recommended to reduce fever and induce diarrhea taste bitter)

Salty foods (kelp and seaweed) can soften hardness, which explains their usefulness in treating tuberculosis of the lymph nodes and other symptoms involving the hardening of muscles or glands.

Mmm… it’s nearly been exactly a year since I went to China. I loved the place we went to, and the food! I never ate so much street food in my life. If only I hadn’t accidentally deleted all the pictures we took of our trip. :’( I just have a few left now.

What exactly is this world coming too? I work with about 5 people who have absolutely no life. They work all week so they can spend it all on alcohol and drugs. They don’t even like the work they do. They have absolutely no appreciation at all for nature or  the environment. They  are just totally locked into their little world. So many people are like that that I know. They are totally destroying their bodies with the toxins they throw into it everyday. I can smell the toxins on them everyday they come to work. It’s oozing out of them. I wish I could just slap them and tell them to wake up haha.   A few of them are actually really nice people but they just have no purpose for their life. Work, drugs and fishing is about it haha. I’m not trying to criticize them and put them down. They are free to do whatever they want but I would hate to live my live and then look back on it and think “damn, I lived for nothing”.