Chinese Food Philosophy

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For Chinese, to maintain health equilibrium foods, classified as yin, yang, or neutral depending on their effect on the body, hyperactivity. Yin foods calm, and Yang foods provoke hyperactivity. Yang foods include eggs, fatty meats and pungent spices; they are strong, rich and spicy. Yin foods including raw fruits and vegetables and seafood, are bitter, salty and light.

The Chinese also have another set of categories for foodstuffs: sweet (earth), bitter (fire), sour (wood), pungent (metal), and salty (water). Each type has influence over human organs and each also corresponds to a different season of the year. Salty foods are best in winter; they help the kidneys and bladder work well. Sweet, earth foods, for summer’s end, get rid of inertia and calm the stomach while bitter foods, eaten in early summer influence the small intestine and heart. Sour, wood foods, meant for springtime, impact upon the liver and gallbladder and contrast with aromatic, metal foods that are eaten in the fall and have power over the large intestine and lungs.

Chinese chefs have through history used their ancient esoteric philosophy to choose between insufficiency and excess. Matching taste with an organ is an application of the “five elements” concept in Chinese culture; it was incorporated with medicine and cooking simultaneously, along with taste, color, weather, and temperament. Color also holds great import regarding the ingestion of food and/or medicine: red colored organic matter affects the heart, green the liver, yellow the spleen, white the lung and black the kidney. Even today Chinese people prefer to eat a porridge of many colors and many pluses “for good luck” during the holidays because the colors are carried and so a better choice for overall hearth and the grains together act as a tonic to promote longevity. Traditional Chinese medicine purports that diet and exercise play a significant role in maintaining good health by contributing to an optimum balance of vital life energy, or Qi. With diet, heredity and environment as the three sources of Qi, Traditional Chinese medicine states that foods we eat directly influence physical excesses and deficiencies.

From China Expedition Tours , you can know more about the Chinese culture.

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