Chinese nutritional therapy—the use of food as medicine, to treat illness and physical challenge—provides an ideal ground for studies of how people think about their place in the organic world. Unlike many folk systems of medicine, Chinese nutrition has a long written history. Doctors and food experts have devoted much effort to articulating and systematizing a vast amount of information. Much of the data comes from folk observation—the empirical experience of generations of farmers and workers. In Chinese medicine, humans as total persons confront a world of plants, animals, and minerals that have varied medical functions. The line between food and medicine does not exist; all foods have some medical significance, and many medicinal herbs are eaten in enough quantity to count as foodstuffs. Theoretically, there is an infinite number of possible ways of thinking about food and health. The Chinese have constructed a system that represents empirical experience well; fits with their cosmology (the cosmology we have already seen in the preceding chapter); and fits with their views on the individual and society. It is a system that classifies and arranges a great number of facts—statements that are true by the standards of Western laboratory science as well as Chinese experience. It incorporates these truths into a plausible and logical structure, and ties the whole thing to the network of emotions, personal values, and deeply held beliefs that sustain Chinese society. To put it a bit crudely, the system wouldn’t sell if it didn’t work. But, also, it wouldn’t sell if it didn’t fit with the rest of the Chinese system of thought and feeling. In this chapter, I provide a rather thorough account of the traditional Chinese construction of nutritional knowledge. I then show how and why it is logically compelling, given the assumptions of Chinese logic. Finally, I suggest some ways in which it seems to fit well with the Chinese experience of being a person in society. Cultural ecology concerns itself with all human relationships with the environment. Food is one of the field’s main concerns. Foodways provide good examples of demand-driven systems.
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