The Temperature of Food Has Nothing to Do With a Thermometer

🔊Chinese medicine assigns every food a temperature nature — cold, cool, neutral, warm, or hot — and the label has nothing to do with the food's actual physical temperature. A bowl of watermelon straight out of a hot summer garden is still classified as "cold" in nature, and a cup of ginger tea served lukewarm is still "warm." The nature describes the effect the food tends to produce in the body after it's eaten, not the temperature on a thermometer.

🔊Cooling foods, like watermelon, cucumber, and mung beans, are traditionally used to clear heat and generate fluids, which is why they're especially popular in the summer heat this course discussed in the seasonal unit. Warming foods, like ginger, cinnamon, and lamb, are traditionally used to dispel cold and support yang, which is why they show up so often in winter cooking. Neutral foods, like rice and most staple grains, sit in the middle and rarely push a person's balance in either direction.

🔊The practical use of this system isn't to sort foods into "good" and "bad" categories — that would just recreate the mistake this course corrected in an earlier unit about yin and yang. The use is matching a food's tendency to a person's current state: a person already running warm gains less from more warming foods, and a person already running cold gains little from a diet of only cooling ones. Food temperature, read this way, is simply another application of the same yin-yang logic covered throughout this course.