Creating a food practice: Flavor & Direction

Depending on the school of thought you work with, there are 5 or 6 flavors in Chinese medicine:

These flavors can be taken up literally. Bitter greens, like kale and dandelion leaves, are bitter foods. Pickled foods are sour. Here, sweet does not refer to foods with added sugar, as these foods are not considered something that should be a regular part of the diet (and thousands of years ago, access to sugar was incredibly more restricted/difficult). Sweet potatoes, rice, and millet are sweet.

Each food also has a directionality that tends to coincide with flavor and temperature. In general, warming foods ascend in the body and cooling foods descend or sink (go down and inward). Spicy, acrid foods ascend - they move upward and outward.

This flavor and directionality relationship also has important therapeutic benefits. For instance, if you have symptoms of reflux or GERD, this is an indicator that the qi of the stomach is moving upward, instead of downward, and heat is rising. In this case, it would be helpful to work with descending foods, which generally are not heating, such as cooked carrots. Descending foods can help to reorient the stomach qi downward, which will help to resolve the reflux symptoms.

Some practitioners understand flavor as an indicator of the function of the food, rather than a literal taste indicator. For example, the bitter flavor coincides with downward directionality. Coffee (plain, black) is very bitter, and beans generally have a downward, descending directionality. For this reason, brewed coffee beans strongly move digestion downward. Tea leaves are also bitter, with a downward directionality. But leaves generally have a less intense downward pull than beans, so brewed tea leaves have a less intense downward effect on digestion. The bitter flavor attribute communicates important information about the function and movement of the food. Since bitter foods move downward, this descension can help to clear and drain.

The five flavors also have relationships with each of the five elements. These elemental affinities help us understand how flavors influence or affect different aspects of our health, which relate to these elements.

A majority of the people I work with clinically experience digestive challenges. The cultivation of a food practice can really help to support healthy, regular digestion - not to spot-treat symptoms, but to create a lasting lifestyle change. We want to get more comfortable working with and combining flavors so that we can create meals that help us move toward or maintain balance within our bodies on a daily basis, each time we interact with food.

Warmly,

Artemisia

Clinical Herbalist | Chinese Medicine

innervillagehealth.com