<p>For thousands of years our food sources, dietary pinciples and foraging activities have provided us with a living reciprocal connection to time and place. When these food traditions are adulterated, overexploited, displaced or broken we lose one of the primary means which sustains our integration with the natural world and binds us together as resilient communities.&nbsp; Our umbilical relationship to nature is disturbed and distorted by this loss, making us into culinary orphans and misfits! As a result the depth and quality of our nourishment, health and connection to life suffers greatly. Over time poor dietary habits, adulterated food sources and a lack of real relationship with the qualities of the foods we eat erodes the foundations of our body and mind, rendering us vulnerable to disease and calamity.&nbsp;Healing the food chain and our alienation from the production and preparation of our food is an important link between planetary healing and individual health.&nbsp; Dis-ease can be seen as an accumulation of misinformation leading to imbalance and distortion of the natural state of the body and mind. If health is the expression of an integrated and coherent body-mind system, then disease is a loss of that coherence through the input or internal generation of confused, inappropriate or conflicting information – fake news! What is usually described as vibrational or energy medicine is actually informational medicine- an art of restoring harmony based on a science of relationship, communication, change and exchange. The art of healing and nourishing the body with food lies in selecting and combining the appropriate information in foods to match the information required by the body and mind to regain and/or increase harmony and maintain ongoing homeostasis. Chinese nutritional therapy uses foods and herbs as medicine to support and nourish health by making use of their capacity to inform the patterning and functional activity of the body. As food forms and informs, it can also transform. Unlike western nutrition which focuses on the biochemical constituents of food and the roles of individual nutrients, the Chinese approach works with the energetic qualities of foods and food combinations, as displayed in their flavour, thermal nature and specific actions. Chinese food energetics matches the energetic properties of foods to the energetic signatures of the body as codified in Chinese medical diagnostic criteria, as well as regulating preparation methods and consumption in accordance with seasonal and climatic changes. Used in this way food is a powerful means of balancing the body-mind system and bringing it into greater harmony with its surroundings. As part of the art of&nbsp;yang sheng&nbsp;Chinese food energetics is a dietary model rooted in a comprehensive understanding of the nature, cycles and principles of life: what it needs to function smoothly and efficiently; what disturbs it and how those disturbances manifest in body and mind and how they may be regulated through what and how we eat. It constitutes a language of food and nourishment based on an ancient natural philosophy and cosmology which integrates human life and nourishment with the life and nourishment of the planetary ecology in which we are embedded.</p>

Nourishing Life Botanicals • Store

Food as personal and planetary medicine