Healing Cuisine of China or Salt

Healing Cuisine of China: 300 Recipes for Vibrant Health & Longevity

Author: Zhuo Zhao

A comprehensive guide to the Chinese art of healing with food 

• Provides more than 300 authentic Chinese recipes for curing specific ailments and for promoting happiness and vitality 

• Explains the theories behind traditional Chinese beliefs about health and diet and reconciles these beliefs with contemporary Western medical knowledge 

• Includes a complete fitness program centered on the popular Chinese qi gong exercises 

Through 5,000 years of recorded history the Chinese have developed an unequaled pharmacopoeia of food remedies and have turned this knowledge into a delicious cuisine that is simple to prepare. This cuisine has little in common with the dishes on the menus of many Chinese restaurants--which have sacrificed traditional Chinese principles to appeal to high-fat Western tastes. Instead, it emphasizes all-natural ingredients eaten in season and in the most beneficial combinations. 

The Healing Cuisine of China features more than 300 authentic Chinese recipes, ranging from simple preparations to cure specific ailments to traditional "longevity banquets." The authors also explain the underlying theories behind traditional Chinese beliefs about health and reconcile these ancient beliefs with Western medical knowledge about bacteria, viruses, and other causes of disease. A complete fitness program, centered on the popular Chinese qi gong exercises, and a questionnaire to help readers discover their individual body requirements make this the most comprehensive guide to the healthy lifestyle of China ever published.

Interesting textbook: Marketing Research or Class Struggle or Family Struggle

Salt: Grain of Life

Author: Pierre Laszlo

For the sake of salt, Rome created a system of remuneration (from which we get the word "salary"), nomads domesticated the camel, the Low Countries revolted against their Spanish oppressors, and Gandhi marched against the tyranny of the British. Through the ages, salt has conferred status, preserved foods, and mingled in the blood, sweat, and tears of humanity. Today, chefs of haute cuisine covet it in its most exotic forms -- underground salt deposits, Hawaiian black lava salt, glittery African crystals, and pink Peruvian salt from the sea carried in bricks on the backs of llamas.

From proverbs to technical arguments, from anecdotes to examples of folklore, chemist and philosopher Pierre Laszlo takes us through the kingdom of "white gold." With "enthusiasm and freshness" ( Le Monde) he mixes literary analysis, history, anthropology, biology, physics, economics, art history, political science, chemistry, ethnology, and linguistics to create a full body of knowledge about the everyday substance that rocked the world and brings zest to the ordinary. Laszlo explains the history behind Morton Salt's slogan "When it rains, it pours!" and looks into the plight of the salt miner, as well as spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance. Salt is a tour de force about a chemical compound that is one of the very foundations of civilization.

Oliver Sacks

I have been darting, delightedly, from one section to another -from Salting Herring to extreme halophiles, to Spectroscopy. It is a marvellous mosaic leavened with great charm and lightness.

Betty Fussell

Laszlo takes something ordinary, looks at it through his dazzling prism of knowledge, and allows the reader to experience its extraordinariness in the process.

Choice

History, chemistry, physics, economics, anthropology, technology . . . linguistics, art history . . . and culinary arts are all explored in this wonderful, multicultural Renaissance approach to the subject of salt. This approach, like salt itself, spices the ordinary and makes a topic that might on the surface seem bland be anything but. . . . Salt is not just plain, and this book is a pleasure to read.

Houston Chronicle

A breathless read. . . because of the suprising appeal and importance of the subject itself.

Roy Herbert

Takes us through the astonishing history of this substance with lightness as well as learning... [his] observations are fascinating.

Washington Post Book World

Readers will never again think of salt . . . in the same simple way.

Globe and Mail

A slender, impish concoction. . . . To say this is a quirky book is like saying Rita Hayworth was an okay-looking gal. . . . Calvinoesque in many ways -filled with lightness, delightful tangents, postmodernist hijinks.

London Review of Books

Offers a rich pickle barrel of facts and anecdotes about salt.

Le Monde

The distinction between the scientific and the nonscientific blurs. One becomes astonished that every day one samples a chemical with such a rich cultural aura -which is to say the wager by the author is a success.

Teresa Weaver

A weirdly compelling blend of chemical analysis and anecdotal history.

Publishers Weekly

If this book's organization gracefully accommodated the breadth of its subjects, it would be a small masterpiece. Unfortunately, a scattershot structure and an awkward translation mar this project, which includes portions that did not appear in the original French edition. Clearly extremely learned, Laszlo writes knowledgeably about everything from a Japanese adage meaning "to salt the greens" to the history of Venetian salt production. These brief sections are linked only in the most cursory way, however, and his tangents frequently carry him far afield, as when he moves from discussing the gabelle, or French salt tax, to addressing taxation in general. The fact that salt is used to create chlorine and can be transformed into PVC or vinyl leads to a rumination on Howard Johnson's motel-restaurants and his wonder at air-conditioning when he moved stateside in the 1960s. He prefaces each chapter of this appealing but frustrating work with a preview of the coming material rather than an effective introduction. While Laszlo's style is rambling and conversational, the translation is jarringly formal, with such clunky language as "this astute way of combining salt preservation with the beginnings of a digestion process using proteolytic enzymes was a revolutionary technique." Much of Laszlo's material is intriguing, and his literacy about everything from chemistry to philosophy provides a helpful perspective on this basic element, but ultimately these choppy pieces never cohere. (Aug.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

French chemist Laszlo here contributes to the seemingly endless flow of histories of various victuals. The author approaches the subject from a multidisciplinary perspective and has written this book "for the public at large but also as a pedagogical utopia." He writes in a verbose and ostentatious style with a profligacy of four- and five-syllable words. Salt has had a far-reaching effect on human history with an impact on politics, language, trade, and taxes, just to name a few. The author explains this by parsing Eastern proverbs and drawing complex analogies. For example, the opening of Balzac's Beatrix takes place on the Guernade peninsula (where salt is harvested). This invokes an almost three-page meditation in which Laszlo concludes that the novelist creates a "fortiori beyond the social." Salt has many such digressions, meanderings, and asides. Salt may be essential for human survival, but this is not an essential purchase. [In the fall, Walker is publishing a history of salt by Mark Kurlansky. Ed.] Tom Vincent, Wake Cty. P.L., Raleigh, NC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Laszlo (chemistry, U. of Li<'e>ge, Belgium and the <'E>cole polytechnique near Paris) offers a set of vignettes on the various aspects of the vital mineral. They include salt-cured food, nomads, harvesting, abuse of power, biology, other science insights, myths, and ethics and politics. was published in 1998 by Hachette Litt<'e>ratures; in the translation, by Mary Beth Mader, he has added some material for American readers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

A chemist constructs a cultural history of sodium chloride and reveals its magnitude in human affairs. In a volume burdened with a plethora of introductory material (there's a foreword, preface, acknowledgments, and introduction-and each short chapter begins with an old-fashioned argument, as well), Laszlo makes it plain that salt is no ordinary white powder. (In fact, he reveals, pure salt is colorless.) He begins with a sort of pedagogical manifesto, declaring that all education, like his study, ought to be multidisciplinary, and then moves into some engaging chapters dealing with various uses (and abuses) of salt. Sailors once used it to disinfect wounds. It was one of the earliest means of preserving food. Many ancient trade routes involved the transportation of salt. The word (and concept of) salary has its origins in salt. We learn how seawater is desalinated, how salt was important in the history of Venice, how Gandhi employed it as a powerful symbol to rally his followers; we learn why the sea is salty (a puzzle: after all, only fresh water flows into it), why salt will clear a wine spill on a tablecloth, why salty foods make you thirsty, why salt will dispatch a slug and will both freeze ice cream and thaw an icy highway. Toward the end, he even waxes metaphysical. Although the volume for the most part is highly readable, Laszlo occasionally allows his erudition to obfuscate, as in one sentence that includes all the following: "mitochondrial RNA sequences," "lipid bilayer," "glycerol," "ether bonds," "RNA-polymerases," "prokaryotes," and "eukaryotes." Yet he can also decline into the lowest puns-e.g., he follows a comment about Morton's attempts to prevent the problemof the hardening of salt with this: "It being salt, they licked it." Readers may also find annoying the editorial decision to permit the translator's numerous notes to appear in the text instead of in unobtrusive footnotes. Displays broad interests and a wide-ranging intellect, but the style-often bland or dully didactic-could use a bit of seasoning.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	salt-cured foods	1
2	nomads	21
3	harvesting	41
4	abuse of power	57
5	biology	91
6	other science insights	105
7	myths	143
	conclusion: ethics ad politics	165
	afterword: the union of earth and sea	171
	Notes	173