I think cooking, an accidental invention from the use of fire, really changed civilization.  Before that we were basically scavengers.  We ate raw food and we died young.  Homo sapiens, the early humanoid, didn’t get the nutrients out of food.  Once cooking began, the food transformed.  That’s the fundamental concept of alchemy. 

As a Qigong practitioner I’m going to approach food differently.  We are more interested in the intrinsic property of motion, what the food does to you.  It’s hard to think about what the food does to you because we tend in the West to have a very different relationship with food.  Instead of using it for healing, it’s used more often for reward, punishment or fun. 

The Chinese Taoists look at food in a very alchemical way.  They categorize food into five tastes.  Each taste has a different function in the body, and affects a particular organ.  The Qi notation along the side shows the four basic directions of movement.

Sour contracts.  It reacts strongly to the liver.  The Qi notation for     contraction is a black square.

  Bitter causes it to descend and gather.  This is also gathers.  Contract is a little   stronger than gather.  The organ affected is the heart.

Sweetness opens, expands, and is represented by the white square.  It especially   reacts to the spleen and digestive system.

Saltiness releases downward.  This expands and brings things down.  The organ is 
 the kidney.

  Spicy and fragrance opens and disperses, and is associated with the lungs.
 

These four basic directions--up, down, open and gather--are very crucial, especially for Qigong therapists or Qigong practitioners.  They affect the organs.  The liver likes to expand; sour contracts.  When you eat a lot of sourness, it will harm your liver. 

The lung direction likes to go downward.  In the case of excessive coughing, if you use bitterness it will help the Qi to gather down  The sweetness, the soothing honey or syrup in cough syrups, can be used to disperse the cough. When you use mentholated rub, that’s fragrant, that’s spicy and that opens the lung. 

These four directions of food can be a combination with each another.  In one organ, the spleen, the movement has both the upward and downward direction. 

I want to give you one more category, which is called hypo/hyper.  This means that food does not interact with a tabla rasa, or blank slate.  You are eating with a condition. 

You could have a hypo reaction to the different tastes because you are deficient.  For example, did you know that in early times in Africa they didn’t get much sweetness?  In Africa the only source of sweetness is what?  Honey, raw honey, not white sugar.  In primitive times they had a hypo sweetness.  When they got a little sweetness, it was very good for their health. 

What do we have here in our society?  Hyper.  This is where the food faddist’s mantra says  “sugar is bad for you. sugar is bad for you, sugar is bad for you.”  If you stop eating sugar for a long time, your body will get to a balance where you need a little sugar.  Not refined sugar, but a very good sugar source.  People say, “I don’t take sugar.’  Then you see them with two loaves of bread.  Carbohydrates are called sugar.  A hyper reaction can come from excessive consumption of starchy food, carbohydrates. 

People say, “I’m trying to eat healthy.  I eat more vegetables.”  Vegetables are sour.  If they have a liver problem, it depends.  If they have a hyper active liver, the sourness will harm them even more.  This is very important.  Don’t have what I call a food faddist or fundamentalist approach to food saying “This is good for me.  This is bad for me.“

One of the things you want to learn from the Tao of food is that always the Tao is in relationship.  What is your situation?  As you study this you want to have a sense of your own profile, your interaction.  Sugar may not be a problem for you but perhaps electrolytes or salt are.  Then you need to get the electrolytes through more seaweed, more fish, not just salt.

Now this interaction goes along at the much deeper level of the organic function of the body.   Chinese herbs follow that.  Certain herbs spread and perspire.  Certain herbs contract and gather in. 

The organic function of the liver goes up; the liver Qi wants to go up.  The liver with normal people, actually I would say 99 % of the time, is excessively hot.   Because the liver detoxifies, it constantly gets over heated.  You want to use food and herbs that help to spread it and cool it.  One of the herbs of food that do that is fragrance.  That’s why Chinese like to drink “Jasmine” tea, a little fragrance to open., rather than tea, which is bitter and contracts so it stimulates the heart.  We have discovered that when you say “XU”  it has an upward spreading and also cooling effect for the liver. 

The heart, if you look at the notation, contracts and the taste is bitter.  Sickness of the heart is expanded.  You want the heart to remain small, not too tight.  Bring the heart in.  Bitterness is incredibly lacking in the western diet.   The Chinese diet uses a lot of bitter herbs.  An example is bitter melon.  Recently they found that the seed of the bitter melon boosts the immune system.  They actually use it for AIDS patients.  Although you can buy it in health food stores now, I suggest you eat the bitter melon.  You have to cultivate a taste for it.  By the way, the sound for the heart which likes to open and release is “HA.”   It releases the excessive heat. 

Then you have the lung.  Lung is spicy.  It likes to disperse and actually likes to disperse with a downwards motion if it’s possible.  The lungs’ Qi  likes to go down.  When you have asthma or cough, the Qi of the lung reverts back up.  You want to send lung Qi downward.

The center is the spleen.  Spleen is sweet.  Sweetness has an expansive quality.  The spleen, you need to know, is the organ that directly relates to musculature.  When you have a hyper reaction it makes your muscle unable to contact.  Muscle strength is how strong you can contract, squeeze, how high you can lift the arm.  When you have a hyper situation sugar makes you really weak.  Long term it causes flaccidity.  Well, you know--doughboy. 

My wife discovered a very interesting thing--people use sugar as a momentary popping up of energy, but without any sustaining power.  It’s like trying to fly a paper plane with a straw tube, keeping the energy up by blowing through the tube every time the plane starts to come down.  When the energy goes down, prop it up, goes down, prop it up, goes down, prop it up.

Finally, it’s the kidney.  Kidney is saltiness, and that contracts, gathers, and moves downward.  Now the bitterness of the heart is also downward flow. 

The interaction of the five tastes movement becomes interesting because the spleen expands and loosens.  What happens when you take a lot of sugar, a lot of bread?  Your digestive system actually gets over-flooded.  It’s like being swamped; you have too much water.  What you need to do is use the bitterness or use the spiciness to get rid of the water.  What is one of the common things used for bladder infections?  Bladder infection in Chinese medicine is considered an over-flooding of water.  You use cranberry juice.  Cranberry is bitter.  It’s alkaline.  If you really drink cranberry without any sweetening, it doesn’t taste that sweet. 

Often patients ask, “what is the best diet for me?”  I remember how my teacher answered one of his patients.  My teacher is such a funny man.  First of all, the patient is Western and my teacher is Chinese.  I don’t think he knows more than a hundred Western words.  So I thought, “Hum, this is going to be interesting.  What is he going to say?”   He said three words,  “Not very much.”  The patient said, “ I don’t understand, doctor.”  My teacher repeated again.  Isn’t that what other people do? If you speak English in China you repeat it ten times and all of a sudden they understand it.  Right?  No.  So he said again, “Not very much” because he thought the patient didn’t understand his English.  “Not very much.”  And I got it--not very much of anything. 

Also, here is also a much deeper thing--eat less, but eat more frequently.  Break up your meals.  We are scavengers.  We find a little deer fallen off a cliff and we have to share with twenty other scavengers.  We get a few mouthfuls and then we have to move on.  Then we find a grub that we put in our mouth and move on.  Early man didn’t sit down and have a side of beef as we do.  It’s very harmful for your stomach; your stomach evolved to digest small amounts of food.  I would say that if you eat a full meal, you are already harming it.  You should eat only 50% at best, if not 1/3.  That’s actually very good to do. 

This business of eating a full meal is a cultural thing from Aristotle sitting down, the Roman big thing.  The Chinese are worse--the banquet.  But remember Chinese banquets should only occur once a year!  In the old time, my mother told me, they had pork four times a year.  That’s the only meat they ever got.  Unfortunately it was only distributed to the households with a male heir.  If you have all girls, you don’t get any pork.  They say, “Oh, it’s a waste of time.” 

Something about banquets is very good.  Once in a while you need to overwhelm your system with nourishment.  That allows your body to kick over...but not every day, every month, every week.  Your body goes into such lack that those banquets serve a function.

You should also rotate your food.  That’s why eating seasonally is better.  Don’t go to your favorite restaurant and order uni all the time, order sushi all the time or order the same thing all the time.  You get a habit.  You start to create what I call a “hyper” allergic reaction.  When my teacher said, “Not very much,” that’s the best advice I ever heard.  People tend to be fanatical.  You take a lot of vitamins; it will poison you.  You eat a lot of meat; that’s too much.  You eat too much vegetables, that’s too much.  When you eat, rotate your food.  Don’t eat very much. 

What I have done today is create a soup for this winter.  It’s called Dragon’s Broth.  I’d like to go through the ingredients and say their properties. 

For example, in Dragon’s Broth the major ingredient is winter melon.  Winter melon gives you the moisture.  The taste of winter melon is actually sour; sour gives moisture.  Moisture is very important in the winter time.  In the winter time the early Chinese citizens already were heating their houses with coal under the bed so it became excessively dry.  You should have winter melon broth every couple of months.  You need the fluids to nourish and moisturize you during the winter time.

Winter melon is a huge melon.  Some times it’s precut.  Other times you see a big melon sitting on the side.  Just point at it and show them how wide you want them to cut it.  Don’t be shy.  You don’t have to buy the whole thing. 

There is a special way for eating winter melon.  Buy a whole winter melon, scoop out the seeds, put the ingredients in, then steam it for six to eight hours.  The winter melon becomes soup from the inside out.  We ordered it in a restaurant when Janet and I went to China.  You have to order it a month ahead.  It’s very expensive and beautiful.  They carve little dragons. 

This is black rice, your grain.  It’s different from wild rice.  It’s slightly sweet, and more gluttonous.  Wild rice is more dry.  Black rice, because of the color black, affects and nourishes the kidney.  Rice is considered sweet.  I learned it as a child.  My mother always yelled at me “Don’t suck at your rice.”  One mouthful, I just sucked it for a long time.  I wouldn’t swallow it because the longer you suck the more your saliva extracts the sugar.  The black rice is actually very wonderful. 

So you have sweet and sour.  The sweetness balances the sour.  If you look at an original Chinese meal, they cook with a sense of balancing the tastes.  The sweetness expands; the sourness brings it back in.  So there you go.  Otherwise you only eat black rice...then it all expands. 

This is the red bean.  Red is for the heart.  The bean is a grain, a legume.  It’s not just simple carbohydrate.  This is a special kind.  It’s not just red, it’s called small red bean.  They are specially medicinal for releasing excessive water.  With any edema it’s very important to release retention of water.  That might seem contradictory because the winter melon gives you moisture. 

Why do you use the red bean to release water retention?  The release is at your cellular level.  It doesn’t do you any good; it’s flooding your system.  Moisture is fluid, it is all over.  It’s not locked in.  It’s almost like the case of a diabetic.  Diabetics have excessive sugar but they can’t bring it to the body.  In a way they could eat more and more but the sugar is not used in the body.  They need insulin to bring the sugar into the body.  Similarly with excessive water then you need the red bean to release. 

Red date is sweet. 

Lotus root is more like a water plant, more like a bulb.  Lotus root nourishes and cleanses the blood.   In the fall the lotus leaves wilt and the plant makes seeds.  Chinese dig them up and sell the lotus root.   Look at the lotus root; they represent marriage.  There is a Chinese ceremony.  If you break or cut the lotus root, you notice there is linkage.  Each section links to the other.  Even though you’re apart from each other the thread continues to link to each other.  When Janet and I got married, my mother brought a big one. 

You bite it and you see the little strand.  Those little strands give the thickening in the blood to stop bleeding.  It’s a natural coagulant.  In Chinese medicine when you have an injury, falling off a horse or getting hurt, you actually have a lotus powder, lotus in powder.  You make a little paste and you eat it.  It will stop the internal bleeding. 

Finding lotus root is a hit or miss kind of thing.  You have to look around for it in Chinatown, the only place that will have it.  Don’t buy it if it’s in a cello-packaging.  That would mean there are sulfites in it to preserve it.  Find it loose. 

The scallion, you could use scallion, garlic, spicy, to get the flavor and also to kill any kind of bacteria.  Scallion is to disperse.

The spicy food, ginger, disperses upward.  Normally it heats but when it causes perspiration it has a cooling effect.   Ginger is used not only in healing foods to eat such as Dragon’s Broth and Ginger Vinegar Pig’s Knuckle Broth but also in healing tea like Hon’s Brew, in ginger peel amulets, compresses and body washes and in aromatherapy. 

The shiitake mushroom is called “dong gui.”  Dong gui nourishes the kidney, nourishes the yin.  Dong gui, by the way, grows on oak wood.  In Japan they take an oak tree and cut half and leave some of it.  You know when you cut a trunk but you don’t cut the whole thing a little shoot comes out.  They cut the oak and put in plugs of shiitake mushroom to grow.  Shiitake mushrooms do not grow on earth, unlike other mushrooms.  That’s why there’s a woodsy quality.  That’s nourishing yin.  Only a few mushrooms love a cold climate.  So that’s for the kidney.

So if you look at the Dragon’s Broth we have winter melon for the liver.  Black rice is for the kidney and spleen.  Shiitake mushrooms are for the kidney.  Red date is for the heart and spleen.  Lotus is for the blood.  It really covers a lot, and it’s very nourishing. 

Originally of course we add snake meat.  That’s why it’s called Dragon’s Broth--rattlesnake.  Snake is considered dragon.  If you go to China where they are serving “dragon meat” it is a euphemism for snake.  And this is the season.  Snake has a very very incredible warming effect.  You could buy rattlesnakes from Texas.  It’s very delicious and does not taste like chicken.  You could use eel too.  It’s not as good as snake. 

Since this is vegetarian I substituted tofu skin.  But tofu skins are good.  It looks like snake, a long stripe of it.   Actually it doesn’t go through fermentation.  The skin of tofu is when it slides up and is sliced.  Tofu skin and tofu are very different.  Tofu goes through fermentation.  They use other chemicals to make it coagulate.  Some people are allergic to tofu, not to tofu skin. 

Dragon’s Broth         (Vegetarian)
 Chinese winter melon, 1 slice               3-5 lbs
 Black rice, 1/2 cup
 Red beans, 1/4 cup
 Red dates, 8
 Lotus root, 2 sections
 Scallion, 1 stalk
 Shiitake mushrooms, 12
 Ginger, 5 quarter size slices
 Bean thread (tofu skin), a bunch
 Water,  to cover in a spaghetti size pot
 A pinch of salt
 Sprinkle of soy sauce, optional 2-3 table spoon

Scoop the seeds out of the Chinese winter melon.  Slice off the peel with a sharp knife and use only the best part of the flesh.  Rinse the red beans and soak briefly.  Peel the lotus root and cut into thin circular slices.   Soak the dried shiitake mushrooms in water to rehydrate.  Peel the ginger and use quarter size slices.  Soak the bean thread to soften. Combine all the ingredients, add water. 
 Bring to a boil and cook covered for 4-5 hour.  Turn off the stove and just let it sit.  Do not lift the cover.  In the morning reheat it for another couple of hours and you have it.  This idea of aging food is very important.  Like yogurt, soup tastes much better the day after. 
 

Dragon’s Broth with meat: 
Warming meat such as rattlesnake, eel or pork may be used to replace Bean thread/tofu skin.

So this Dragon’s Broth has a very centralizing and warming effect.  Not too salty, not too spicy, not too sweet. That’s what balance tastes like.  These days taste has become so extreme by pulling tastes to excessive sweetness or excessive spiciness.  This is returning to center. 

I gave you the most standard Taoist healing formula for this Dragon’s Broth.  You could increase or decrease ingredients, take ingredients out, to your liking.  But this is very centralized.  This is like a full meal.  If you want to eat vegetarian have this every couple of days, you’d be in good shape.  Notice there’s not too much carbohydrate.

I want to say that this workshop is to bring your consciousness to food.  If you want to eat healthy, don’t buy pre-fabricated food.  You don’t know who fixed it ahead of time and it’s expensive.  They put in preservatives to make it last for three days like a 7-11 sandwich.   Prepare and cook your food.  It’s not that hard.  You cook a broth, a soup, put it in a glass container, and put it in the refrigerator.  You will have it for three or four days.  Heat it up with a hot air convection oven.  Don’t use microwave, OK? 

The skill of cooking is a different matter.  How to choose, how to buy the best food, how to prepare the food, that is experience.  That’s lost if you don’t go to the market with your mother.  To pick this, shake that. 

My Chinese patients are great.  They know which store is the best for everything.  They know the whole Chinatown topography by which store has the best of each thing.  I’ve memorized the whole Chinatown.  When you go to the supermarket, everything is wrapped.  If you buy from nature there are fish that will kill you if you eat them.  This other fish, the same kind of fish, is much better.  We went to the market and bought catfish fillet.  They put the worst on top.  I said, “I don’t want that.  I want that one.”  In choosing food, just like a scavenger, it’s very crucial. 

After eating the Dragon’s Broth how does everybody feel?  Kind of warm and kind of peaceful?  Good food is like this.  Our Ancient Taoist Practice Society does not want to transmit only ancient practices but also how to live in harmony with our world.  That is really the Tao. 
 
 
 

( Caution: The above statements are not meant as any form of medical advice. They merely serve as informative and educational purposes. If you have a medical problems please consult a qualified medical physician.) 
 
 

 by Dr.Adriano Borgna L.Ac.

Hon's Brew:  Ginger tea
5 slice of Ginger
1 lemon
3 table spoon of Honey or to taste
1 Cup of hot water