Twelve: Food as Medicine
The infirmities of the flesh have given rise to as many varieties of medicine as there have been tribes, races, and societies. All manner of locally found substances have been used medicinally: barks, leaves, roots, insects, parts of animals, even mineral matter. Medicines have been physical, as in the drawing of blood, or spiritual, as in rituals to draw out evil spirits. And all of them, at some time or another, for one reason or another, have been, or have seemed to be, effective in some way. Whether this is because of the presence of a true healer, the right medicine, or a gullible patient is probably not relevant. What is relevant is that there are many systems of medicine, and modern Western healing techniques constitute just one of them, neither the ultimate nor necessarily the best one, although today perhaps the most powerful and influential 1— as well as the most expensive. CAN FOOD BE MEDICINE? Food, if appropriate, as we have seen in this book, can continually heal our bodies, rebalancing them whenever they go slightly off-balance. It is thus a healing substance. But is it, strictly speaking,“ medicine”? We usually think of medicines or remedies as strange or unusual substances, difficult to get, or specially prepared by experts, that will cure our sickness and eliminate our pain. We think of food as something that nourishes us, pleases us, and keeps us alive. But good doctors and healers throughout history have known that just as food continually builds our body, so it can alter it.
* This is not a new concept. Hippocrates taught, in a maxim oft repeated, that food should be our medicine and medicine should be our food. In most traditional medical systems on earth( except our own) food plays an integral part, and common foods are often used with medicinal purpose. Although food is admittedly not the ultimate panacea, there is a power in it that we in our culture have barely begun to glimpse; food is, in ways yet unclear,“ powerful medicine.” Let’ s not forget that according to the Old Testament the knowledge of good and evil, as well as the possibility of immortality, were both conditioned upon eating something, in that case the fruit of a tree. One fairly amusing episode comes to my mind to illustrate this notion of the power of food. In 1978, more than sixteen years after I had left Argentina, I returned for a visit. My high school friends were aware of my work with food and were curious.“ What is it that you’ re teaching?” they wanted to know. So I offered to cook them a meal and explain some things. Gleefully, the offer was accepted, and a few days later I found myself making dinner for a party of twelve. I made a light, ample meal: carrot cream soup, brown rice, sautéed green squash with herbs, salad with lemon and olive oil dressing, broiled fish, homemade bread and spread, and baked apples with raisins and cinnamon. 3 Nothing terribly weird, I thought, but still quite a change from the Argentines’ usual fare of steak or breaded fried veal cutlets with french fries, salads bound with mayonnaise, and cheese or custard for dessert. Before dinner, my friends asked if they were allowed to have a little wine. Sure, I shrugged, they were used to it, why not. So during the meal the men went through their customary eight bottles of burgundy— and to everyone’ s amazement, they got roaring drunk. As this reaction was totally unexpected, they didn’ t quite notice their condition until the next day, when they realized how the evening had ended: one getting an outlandish haircut from another; one crashing his car( no big damage); one couple sleeping well into the morning so that they were late for work and the kids missed school; and other assorted mishaps and complications. In all, an unforgettable experience— they’ re still talking about it. What happened? Apparently, their usual high-fat, high-protein meals had been balanced by the wine that accompanied them, so drunkenness was never an issue. In fact, the expansive wine probably made those heavy contractive meals easier to take. But the light( low-fat, low-protein), high— complex-carbohydrate meal that I made completely altered my friends’ physiological response to alcohol— with the result that what was normally a comfortable quantity of wine turned into an excess and made them drunk. The episode greatly increased my respect for food’ s ability to change our metabolism very quickly. One meal, perhaps one bite, can have a pronounced effect. In many situations food is indeed, as American Indians traditionally believed, something that can“ control nature,” make us strong or weak, give or take away“ power”( the ability to do or to have an effect), both cause and remedy many of our ills; therefore, a potent medicine. THE LAW OF REMEDIES It is important to keep in mind that any remedy, whether drug, herb, or food, can indeed both cause a disorder and heal it. This, in fact, is one of the basic principles of the natural healing system called homeopathy, according to which the substance that causes a certain symptom will cure that symptom if consumed in a smaller quantity. 4