Food Trek Chinatown

Regular canvas contributor Laura Collins-Hughes takes an herbal food tour through Chinatown and makes some observations on the way we eat and the way we heal.

In Western culture, the divide between medicine and food is generally unambiguous. Not so in Chinese culture, nor in New York’s Chinatown, where tradition recognizes herbs as medicine but also as food.

“There’s no distinction in many of the Chinese herb shops,” Letha Hadady said the other morning, leading a small gaggle of reporters and publicists through stores on Canal and Mulberry streets and the winding lanes beyond. Bins were stocked with medicinal mushrooms and fat twigs of ginseng root; jars were filled with fragrant loose teas and flower blossoms; packets of seeds promised a trip down a different garden path, lined with Chinese kale, bitter melon, Chinese cabbage, amaranth. Out on the sidewalk, women sold gingko nuts near a greengrocer offering fresh lotus and Chinese okra.

To people who do their grocery shopping in standard-issue American supermarkets, all of this is not just exotic but entirely unfamiliar. If you shop in health-food stores, you’ve been seeing many of these items for years, even if it’s only now that they’re creeping into the mainstream. But in Chinatown, the prices reflect familiarity: You’ll pay only a small fraction of what you’d pay for the same herb – maybe processed and packaged, but the same herb – in the vitamin aisle at your local health-food store.

An acupuncturist and herbalist, Hadady is a regular in Chinatown, where she gives what she calls Herbal Market Walking Tours. Her own first exposure to herbs, however, came in her Hungarian grandmother’s garden, and she sees an unpleasant contrast between the meal-centered family in which she grew up and the fast-food ethos America has since embraced.

“In our fast-paced, give-it-to-me-instantly world,” she said, “we’re getting farther and farther away from our food and our family and ourselves.”

On a ramble through Chinatown, getting close to the food is easy enough. But as we delve further into cultures like these that are near but yest so far, their philosophy about the wholness of food for pleasure, sustenance and health –and the self awareness that may bring – will follow.

Laura Collins Hughes