Category Archives: Taste

The Five Elements of Eating

Digestion, Five Flavours, Food, Nei Jing, Taste, , , ,

As a child I learned the importance of good food from my parents. While we didn’t have spare cash for holidays, flash clothes, or even schoolbooks,  good food was always  the highest priority, and I never suffered from going hungry. As a latchkey teenager, it became my responsibility to prepare dinner when my mother was working, and I built up a list of simple recipes, mostly one-pot meals in the trusty Sunbeam frypan. Things like spaghetti bolognaise, Mexican rice and curry. This early training engendered a love of a facility for cooking. And eating!

When I encountered the Five Element model of Chinese medicine, it was natural to bring this paradigm into the kitchen. In 1991 I joined a training in the Five Elements known as the Sophia Program of the Traditional Acupuncture Institute in Maryland, USA. This showed me a way of living that is in harmony with the seasons of nature. Each year since then I have chosen a theme  to act as a framework for keeping in touch with the changing energies of the seasons and their corresponding Elements. My blogs over the past 11 years have reflected these choices.

Last month, after I’d penned the final in the series on the pathogenic factors and was casting about for a subject for the coming year, a friend gave me a lovely gift of Zoey Xinyi Gong’s new book, “The Five Elements Cookbook” which inspired the theme for the coming year.

What follows here is an introduction to the theme. Later articles will address each Element in its own season, showing how we can utilise Five Element principles to inform our cooking and eating choices to be in harmony with this fundamental rhythm.

Eating fresh, nourishing, tasty food that is artfully presented is one of the joys of living a human life. It stimulates the appetite, appeals to the senses and nourishes body and soul. It needs not only to taste good but smell good and look good. These qualities are reflected in some of the key resonances of the Five Elements.

The five flavours and their respective Elements are salty (Water), sour (Wood), bitter (Fire), sweet (Earth), and pungent (Metal). Not all dishes will have all five flavours, but a meal should include all representations for balance.

A balance of the five colours is similarly important. A variety of blue/black, green, red, yellow and white colours is appealing. Again, while not all colours need appear in a dish, some variety is important. Imagine how visually unappealing would be a meal of chicken, cauliflower and potato all smothered in a white sauce. Some salad greens or a spoon of a red condiment, for example, would temper the whiteness.

The Five Element model also provides us with information on how to choose foods that are in harmony with the season. It is natural that we are drawn to cool foods in hot weather and warm foods in cold weather.  But we can also make choices as to colour and flavour to support the energy of the season. For example, eating more green and sour foods in spring; more yellow and sweet foods in the late summer.

A fun use of the five flavours in cooking is the principle that the flavour of one Element controls the flavour of its grandson Element. Thus salt (Water) will control bitter (Fire); bitter will control pungent (Metal); pungent will control sour (Wood); sour will control sweet (Earth); and sweet will control salty. If you’ve made a dish that is too salty, try adding something sweet to balance the flavours. Too sweet? Add something sour. It can be fun to play with this. For more detail on this, see previous blog A Taste of Earth.

The five flavours can also be used medicinally to treat certain conditions. Each flavour benefits its corresponding yin organ: salt benefits the kidneys, sour benefits the liver, bitter benefits the heart, sweet benefits the spleen and pungent benefits the lung.

However, overindulgence of these flavours will not only injure the corresponding organ, but also the tissues associated with the grandson Element. For example, too much salt damages the blood vessels, as we know from western dietary models. Too much sweet damages the bones

Another resonance to consider is that of the climatic factors which we explored over the last year: Cold (Water), Wind (Wood), Heat (Fire), Damp (Earth) and Dryness (Metal). When there is weakness in an Element, the corresponding climatic factor can invade the body and become a pathogenic factor. We tend to be susceptible to the climate of the season, but we can succumb to any in any season. When this happens, we can turn to food to help combat the invaders.

This knowledge is ancient, well tried over millennia. The Huang Di Nei Jing, or Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, was compiled about 2,300 years ago, and reflects countless prior centuries of understanding. This classic is replete with references to food and its use in medicine, and I will be drawing from that ancient text over the coming year. I will also include recipes that can support us in the season we are traversing.

Look out soon for the first tasty instalment in our southern hemispheric season of winter.

Huang Di Nei Jing

Taste of Earth

Digestion, Earth Element, Taste, , , , , , ,

The arrival of the Late Summer season has me thinking of food. To be honest, I think about food in every season and several times a day. But the Earth season is particularly evocative of the sense of taste. Just look at all the wonderful harvest of fruit that appears in the markets at this time of year. Cherries, nectarines, peaches, melons, berries, apples, pears and more. A cornucopia of soft, sweet yumminess. To say nothing of the groaning tables of fresh vegetables at the Farmers Markets. Just thinking of it has me salivating.

While filming for the Earth video recently, I took a tour of the Adelaide Farmers Market and sampled all of the many different flavours on offer, thinking while tasting of the associations of each of the Elements. As I bit into a juicy Kalamata olive, the salty flavour evoked the Water Element of the sea from which our distant ancestors emerged. The sour taste of a grapefruit evoked the sharpness and directness of the Wood Element. The bitter flavour of dark chocolate gave a taste of the Fire Element as well as a caffeine charge to fuel its activity. The sweetness of all the fruits brought a roundness to the mouth that captured the Earth Element’s sweet character. And the pungent flavour of a spicy pie brought forth the Metal Element’s characteristics of concentration and distillation.

Much Asian cooking pays close attention to the balance of these five flavours in a meal. When the five flavours are in balance and harmony, we are accessing the very nature of the Five Elements and the harmonious interplay of their vibrations.

We can use this information about the five tastes in a number of ways.

You can begin by examining your food choices to see if any of the flavours are missing from your diet. If you notice, say, that you don’t have much sour food in your diet, you could start adding cider vinegar to soups or salad dressings,  putting a spoonful of sauerkraut on the side, taking lemon juice in water or adding slices of lime to drinks.

Notice if you have an aversion to a particular flavour which you exclude from your diet altogether. This may indicate an imbalance in the corresponding Element. For example an aversion to bitter foods may be telling you that your Fire Element is out of balance. Perhaps find some bitter foods that can be added to your food so you are not overwhelmed by the flavour on its own.

Also notice if there is a flavour which you crave. There is a clinical anecdote of a Polish man who habitually added a whole cup of vinegar to a bowl borscht soup, clearly signalling an imbalance in his Wood. Many people are addicted to sugar which is highly detrimental to the Spleen organ of the Earth Element. If this is you, try to substitute refined sugars with naturally occurring sugars in whole fruits and vegetables.

For me, the coolest use of the five tastes is found in the operation of the Five Element control (ke) cycle. In this cycle, each Element controls or restrains the Element that is the grandson, i.e. two positions ahead. Water controls Fire, Fire controls Metal, Metal controls Wood, Wood controls Earth and Earth controls Metal. If we look at the corresponding tastes, we find that the same principle applies in a very practical culinary way. Salt will control bitter in the way that the bitterness of eggplant is removed by rubbing salt into it. A bitter food will tame a dish that is too spicy. If your curry is too hot, grate some dark chocolate into it. A pungent herb or spice will control the tartness of sour tastes like citrus or vinegar. In turn, a sour flavour will make palatable a food that is sickly sweet. And finally a sweet flavour will overcome too much salt. This is a well-known strategy of food processors who use salt to preserve the food, then sugar to mask the salty flavour.

Next time you find that your pot of soup, stir-fry or other meal has one flavour that is overpowering the others, while you can’t remove the flavour, you can add another flavour to control it. Try it!

Check this table which lists some of the foods that correspond to each of the five tastes.

TASTE ELEMENT FOODS
Salty Water Sea salt, miso, soy sauce, tamari, seaweed, dulse, arame
Sour Wood Citrus, cider vinegar, pickled/fermented vegetables, sauerkraut
Bitter Fire Cos lettuce, bitter greens, chicory, dandelion, citrus peel, dark unsweetened chocolate, tonic water, coffee
Sweet Earth Most fruits, pumpkin, carrot, sweet corn, rice, potato, cabbage, tomato, beets, almonds, walnuts, chicken
Pungent Metal Garlic, onion, spices such as turmeric, cloves, cinnamon, chilli; strong herbs such as rosemary, basil, fennel

One final use of the control cycle is in the case of overconsumption of certain flavours. When an excess of a flavour is consumed, it impacts upon the organ of the Element it controls, namely its grandson:

Too much salt injures the Heart.

Too much bitterness injures the Lung

Too much pungency injures the Liver

Too much sourness injures the Spleen

Too much sweetness injures the Kidney

Therefore be balanced in all of your consumption. The Elements and organs of your bodymind will sing harmoniously in gratitude.

Bon appétit.