For the last few weeks I’ve been traveling in Taiwan and Korea while also preparing to move into a new apartment. As a result, this month’s essay has a little less research and a little more personal reflection because that’s what my brain could handle!
A small disclaimer: I am still very much a student of TCM and herbalism, with much to learn. If I misrepresent anything in this piece, I hope you will share your knowledge with me.
Across the street from our hotel, I can look down onto the roof of an old building complex. In the hazy morning light, a person in a hot pink apron moves across it, tending to a shocking patch of green. It’s a bit too far away to make out what exactly is growing there, but the roof is lush and full, and it’s clear that they are harvesting some of the plants to eat.
This scene delights me but it isn’t surprising. Everywhere I turn on my walks through the winding alleyways of Taipei, I see herbs and flowers, sweet potato leaves and mugwort and cilantro. This balance of beauty with functionality, food and art, resourcefulness and pleasure, is very much what I associate with Taiwan, the country of my husband’s family.
This is my third time here, and my first with enough Chinese skill to navigate independently. I befriend the auntie who sells me oranges in the morning, the uncle selling bao who tries to explain the suān cài filling to me, then laughs when I tell him that I like it very much, and can I please have two. Through my eating and shopping, I’m also continuously on the lookout for food as medicine in practice, particularly Traditional Chinese Medicine, or TCM.
What is TCM?
TCM has been practiced throughout China and its diaspora for thousands of years, but it has entered the modern global conversation more visibly in the last eighty or so. In the late 1950s, the standardization of Chinese medicine and meditation practices occurred in TCM colleges and other institutions, aligning with the Communist state-building project's emphasis on cultural heritage. In the 1990s, amid China’s rapid economic expansion and globalization, commodifiable aspects of TCM grew more popular and led to greater integration of TCM with global science.1
TCM is one of the oldest forms of food as medicine in practice, viewing disease as stemming from imbalances in the flow of qi (roughly translated to life force or bodily energy), influenced by external factors, emotions, and lifestyle choices, including diet. Through modalities like acupuncture, herbal medicine, food, and massage, TCM works to support the body’s existing healing capacity, considering organs as interconnected networks rather than isolated structures, with qi flowing through meridians connecting them.2
Food and Medicine in Daily Practice
I’ve long been curious about TCM, and have some basic knowledge of its applications through food. So before this trip, I reached out to writers and food experts Clarissa Wei and Ivy Chen to ask if they knew of anyone practicing TCM or incorporating food as medicine into their work that I could speak to in preparation for this piece. But what I quickly learned is that TCM is so pervasive here that it’s almost more difficult to find folks to talk to about it. In Taiwan, it’s just part of the way of cooking. Ivy explained to me that many medicinal recipes like longan and red date tea (桂圓紅棗茶) and four flavor soup (四神湯) are regularly available at restaurants and stores and simply part of everyday life.
The Taipei Medical University Hospital has an entire department devoted to TCM, and there are vendors everywhere in the city selling spices, flower, and herbs with medicinal properties. I recognized ingredients from what my mother in law has taught me over the years, and it was easy to find dishes that supported my body’s needs throughout this trip. There was gingery congee with pickled vegetables for an upset stomach and bracing herbal tea for a mild hangover. Probiotic drinks with snow fungus and goji berries, both anti-inflammatory and immune system supporting ingredients, were available in every 7-11 and Family Mart.
The approach to food here is so different than back in the States, and it’s inspiring to see what a food culture can look like that’s centered around the idea that food can be used for healing just as much as pleasure. But I also notice how the concepts of food as medicine and TCM extend beyond meals. There are so many green spaces here, and there are places that prioritize community gathering around not only meals but also play, exercise, and ritual.
While I’ve been on this trip, TCM practitioner and RD Zoey Xinxi Gong has been traveling through China and posting regularly about the pervasiveness of TCM there. I’ve long admired Zoey (a fellow NYU grad) for her ability to make TCM more accessible to people like me, and her Instagram has been an incredible window into the ways TCM is a part of life in many cases rather than a separate medical treatment. Seeing her experience and holding it in comparison to mine, I’m thinking a lot about what it might look like to bring some of the lessons from TCM back home.
I’ve considered for a long time now the separation we’ve had in the west between what we eat and how we live. As a culture, it feels to me like the U.S. may appreciate food but doesn’t revere it in the same way my Taiwanese family does. And I think that separation translates into other public experiences, like green space, community centers, and opportunities for connection. I guess what I’m reacting to is the shared sense of care that I feel in Taiwan, where food is both a right and a joy, a place of healing and a place of pleasure, and meant to be shared in so many public spaces from parks to shopping malls to night markets.
As I prepare to move to a new neighborhood and home, and as my masters program at NYU draws to a close, I want to better translate my love of food and my desire to provide healing into meaningful work. In a place like Taiwan, that progression feels so natural, but in New York it feels like I will have to very intentionally carve out space and time for this way of being. I may have to work outside the parameters of western culture to accomplish that reality. Because what I’ve experienced here is so different from any of the other modalities of food as medicine and public health; those concepts are just part of life here. I’m not sure if that means building my own community space, or continuing to learn and cook and provide for others, but I do know that I’m taking the image of that lush roof garden home with me, and I plan to start building my own food as medicine community where and when and how I can.
Reading
I’m technically on vacation, so I’m curling up with some good fiction. I just finished Bryan Washington’s Family Meal which was delicious and devastating and incredibly lovely.
Eating
Literally as much Taiwanese food as I can get my hands on. Braised pork rice, mango shave ice, meals out with friends, buns on corners, 711 egg sandwiches, scallion pancakes, etc. My favorite bite? The 豬血糕, or steamed pig blood cake, that I get every time I come here. The dark sticky rice is reminiscent of a black sausage, but it’s brushed with sweet soy paste, coated in peanuts, and dusted with cilantro. It’s chewy, dark, crisp, sweet, savory, fragrant, and one of my ultimate snacks.
Elisabeth Hsu (2008) The History of Chinese Medicine in the People's Republic of China and Its Globalization, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 2:4, 465-484, DOI: 10.1215/s12280-009-9072-y
Mount Sinai - Traditional Chinese Medicine. Accessed via: https://www.mountsinai.org/health-library/treatment/traditional-chinese-medicine