Good health requires good food. In Chinese medicine, disease is disharmony, the result of vital energies in the organs blocked or for too long left out of whack. You don’t just eat for flavour or nutrients. What you eat can counter your constitution(the product of your genes), your bad choices, and all the demands of living. The Chinese medicine traditions that passed to me did not come as they typically would through the women in my husband’s family (they have German roots), but through the filter of my father’s vivid, though distant, memories. His beginning the mountains west of the Pearl River Delta and land in America, where he became a scientist developing vaccines and materials for space among other things that made his early years without plumbing and electricity feel worlds away. My dad learned to read as sons of families rooted in tradition did, reciting the Compendium of Materia Medica (本草纲目), a massive tome of plants and prescriptions that is still the most comprehensive resource on Chinese medicinal foods since the first edition arrived five hundred years ago. When someone in his house fell ill, he picked bitter herbs and tender hearts of bamboo that grew on the hillsides to steep into soothing broths.