Food as Medicine: Part 4 - India

Food as Medicine:

Part 1 - Prehistory

Part 2 - Ancient Greece

Part 3 - Ancient China

Part 4 - India

Part 5 - Medieval Europe and the Middle East
Part 6 - Proverbial Apples and Poultry-laden Soups

India

India has had a long history with medicine, and is home to perhaps the oldest form of medicine as well. There are some schools of thought that believe it was the Indus Valley civilizations that first began to make strides in the field of medicine, but the proof of Indian medicine is much more solidly proven once the Vedic civilizations came around in 1,000 B.C. In fact, while Vedic medicine branches off in a few different schools, the Ayuveda train of thought is still referenced today for those in search of alternative medicine. 

After exploring ancient healing in China and Greece, India is the final nail in the "these theories are all really similar" coffin. Like Hippocrates and scholars in the Han Dynasty, Vedic medicine postulates that five elements make up all things and have a quality.

Earth is heavy and dry.
Water is cold and wet.
Fire is hot and light.
Wind is light and dry.
Space is light.

All of these elements must be kept in balance in the body according to ancient Ayurveda medicine. Aside from employing methods of heating, moistening and drying, the medicine also used food to counter the combining effects of the elements.

One of the most influential doctors was Mana Bajra Bajracharya. He based his practice on the hereditary knowledge of his patients, prescribing them specific diets based on their family history and after calculating their constitution through specific aspects of their body. He employed three diets: Vata, Pitta and Kapha. Vata covers movement, Pitta governs heat, and kapha encompasses structure; all three make up a healthy body.

For example, to stimulate the Vata, one would eat salty, fatty and hot foods to increase blood flow and stimulate everything from better skin to a better spring in your step. 

Ayurveda is incredibly in-depth and still remains as in-depth and as in use today as it was in ancient times, making it one of the longest lasting forms of medicine. Whether it works as good as modern medicine, that is a debate that holistic supporters and scientific supporters must mince out amongst themselves.

 

Food as Medicine: Part 3 - Ancient China

Food as Medicine:

Part 1 - Prehistory

Part 2 - Ancient Greece

Part 3 - Ancient China

Part 4 - India

Part 5 - Medieval Europe and the Middle East
Part 6 - Proverbial Apples and Poultry-laden Soups

Ancient China

Even today, China is famous for their use of food as medicine. The earliest work on the topic came about during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) with a book called The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine. Although now 2,000 years old, the tome still contains the basics of Chinese food therapy used today. 

The food written about within classifies the known ingredients into four food groups, five tastes and by their natures and characteristics. Like Hippocrates, the tome gave recommendations on what to eat in order to keep balance of qi, yin, yang and body fluids within the body. As the changes in weather also affected the balance in the body, Chinese food therapy also includes a number of seasonal dishes.

Even today, the amount ingredients used for medical purposes is enough to fill a book, or even multiple books, as medical cuisine was eventually broken into four categories: health-protection cuisine, prevention cuisine, healing cuisine and therapeutic cuisine.

Health-protection cuisine refers to the reinforcement of nutritional food to correspond to and maintain organic health. In more understandable terms, it basically boils down to eating things like a soup of pumpkin and almond to help lose weight; a soup of carp and angelica to increase natural beauty; or eating a ginseng congee (rice porridge) to increase strength.

Prevention cuisine is used to build resistance to ailments. This leads to dishes like mung bean soup, which is often eaten in the summer to prevent heat stroke.

Healing cuisine is where medicinal food is used for rehabilitation from illness. One of the most popular dishes among this subset of medical cuisine is broiled sheep's heart with rose to help raise a healthier constitution.

Finally, therapeutic cuisine aims at easing a specific ailment such as using fried potatoes with vinegar to help high blood pressure or a carp soup with Tickahoe to help reduce swelling.

 

Food as Medicine: Part 2 - Ancient Greece

Food as Medicine:

Part 1 - Prehistory

Part 2 - Ancient Greece

Part 3 - Ancient China

Part 4 - India

Part 5 - Medieval Europe and the Middle East

Part 6 - Proverbial Apples and Poultry-laden Soups

 Ancient Greece

As the homeland of Hippocrates, the first physician that considered medicine to be a science rather chalking illness up to divine punishment, it is only natural that ancient Greece would have a few foods they also prescribed as medicine.

Hippocratic medicine was all about balancing the four humours of the body (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood) through the four elements of the cosmos (air, earth, water and fire) and the quality of each element (cold, dry, damp and warm). This thought process would continue on through the middle ages. Herbs, medical practices and food all served as tools to balance the humours. Hippocrates practised close observation and sound judgement and he stated that healing had to be found through experience and through the properties of various vegetable foods, and discovered that what was suitable in health was unsuitable in sickness and the accumulation of these discoveries was the origin of the art of medicine.

Through this trial and error, a number of food concoctions became popular. The most popular potions were water and honey, an infusion of barley or milk. These were meant to be eating in place of food when sick due to their ability in balancing one humour or another and overeating was thought to just make the imbalance worse.

Food as Medicine: Part 1 - Prehistory

"An apple a day keeps the doctor away" - an old adage that has been tossed about by mothers and apple salesmen alike; likewise, everyone knows the reputed healing powers of a steaming bowl of chicken soups even if it doesn't have an adage of its own. An increasing number of people are putting their faith in food for healing powers instead of modern medicine. However, it is far from a new idea. Foods have been used in a medical capacity dating back to our Neolithic ancestors, who benefited from a number of herbs that were incorporated to their hunter-gatherer diet. Later evidence of food used as evidence would come from almost every civilization in the ancient world. 

Yet, today the issue of food as medicine is a hotly contested topic, namely because we have all this helpful medicine laying around in hospitals and such. Regardless of your particular thoughts on the debate, there is no arguing that humanity has come a long way from eating random plants to see if they would help a fever to injecting purified mold to treat a particularly nasty infection.

Food as Medicine:

Part 1 - Prehistory

Part 2 - Ancient Greece

Part 3 - Ancient China

Part 4 - India

Part 5 - Medieval Europe and the Middle East
Part 6 - Proverbial Apples and Poultry-laden Soups

Pre-History

Prehistoric medicine is a bit of a guesswork area of history. Why? Because plants tend to decompose within a few years, which makes finding proof of what our ancestors used as medicine thousands of years ago a bit of a task.  Regardless, what archeologists and historians have sorted out has come from the less degradable objects found among bodies. It is particularly the tools of the occasional medicine man that are the most telling. Pouches, bowls and a series of other tools indicate herbs, plants and clay were integral in prehistoric medicine. Unfortunately, there is some debate as to whether these herbs were used as poultices or eaten, but most likely both methods were employed. Regardless, they likely ate medicinal plants; it is just whether they did it for the medicinal effect or just because it was edible where opinions differ.

Food: Why no Why?

There are a lot of questions when it comes to food.

"How long do I have to cook this for?"

"Is this organic?"

"Does this fish taco smell funny to you?"

"Mom, when will that burger find its way from the grill and into my mouth?"

However, with all these questions, it seems no one really asks the why of it all. Why do we eat this particular meal, where did it come from, and why did people originally put this combination together?

It seems fitting that this post mark the very first post on Behind the Bread, a blog dedicated to highlighting the history behind each dish and discovering why it has ended up being eaten by millions throughout the years.

While more and more people are questioning where the actual ingredients in each dish are coming from, no one examines why those ingredients go into a dish. So, why no why?

The history of food is likely one of the few histories that the world may want to repeat. Great innovation has come from just tossing things together. However, chefs today learn more from the science behind flavor. This has made the history of food somewhat irrelevant. No one needs to know how someone discovered the combonation came to taste good and thus ingrained in a culture, they only want to know why ingreidents taste good together so they can make the next food breakthorough.

Unfortunately, it seems the brilliance of our ancestors is destined to be forgotten, but not here.