Category — Food Thoughts

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.

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It’s a brave new Web 2.0 world out there. Time’s Person of the Year is (annoyingly) “You.” Theoretically, “You” are empowering yourself via the internet by blogging, comparison shopping, posting to bulletin boards, making new friends and business connections on LinkedIn and MySpace. Maybe you are even authoring web videos. It’s a wonder anyone has time to get in front of a stove to cook the family meal. We’ll, how about doing both? My friends at Realmeals.tv encourage the budding Mario Battali to break out the digital video camera and iVideo software, and start cooking. Submit your video recipe directly to the site, and enjoy watching yourself concoct an Apple Martini, make your own “DIY” wedding cake, or get dressed up like Elvis and make a peanut butter and fried banana sandwich that’s true to the King’s original recipe. Get a YouTube buzz going, and maybe someone with a yen for obscure cooking talent and a fat checkbook will make you the next Rachel Ray. It’s worth a shot.

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