Valentine's Day Food for the Heart

It's Valentine's Day, 2014 and there's most of a foot of snow and ice here in Spruce Pine, NC.  Snowbound along with a lot of the east coast yesterday, I spent the day listening to acupuncture talks by Jeffrey Yuen and reading about herbs.  In my reading, I bumped into a journal that took me by pleasant surprise: Plant Healer Magazine.  It's an amazing compendium of art, articles, history and botanical wisdom with a fleet of contributors you might see at one of the big herb conferences.  



I was thrilled to see such a resource and immediately downloaded it to my iPad as a PDF which I can read freely in iBooks.  After virtually thumbing through it, I settled on a long article on bitters by Jim McDonald.  I've taken bitters for years because of two herbal healers: Chief Two Trees who used to visit Spruce Pine in the 80's and Maria Treben, an Austrian herbalist who wrote Health from God's Garden.  

As anyone with even a little nutritional knowledge knows, the bitter taste is the least favored flavor in American food.  We get most of our bitter stimulation from chocolate and coffee.  McDonald talks extensively on how bitters affect and benefit the digestive system all along the way from the mouth to the large intestine.  Many Chinese herbalists emphasize the need to taste your herbs so they prescribe teas or granules instead of teapills.  Some people chew up their teapills.  The reasoning behind this is that there are loads of taste receptors on the tongue that deliver flavors, which are a kind of nutrition in themselves, to the body. Dr. Sean Marshall, founder of Jung Tao School of Classical Medicine, emphasized this pathway in our curriculum.  He said the "sapors" as he called them by-passed the rest of the digestive tube and went directly to the spleen which in turn distributed them to the other organs.  McDonald says that these bitter taste receptors (TAS2R) have been found all over the body, even in the gallbladder, testes and respiratory tract.  

In Chinese Medicine, it's the fire phase (or element) that is associated with bitter flavors.  The fire phase is connected to the heart and small intestine as well as the heart protector and what is called by several names: triple heater, san jiao, triple warmer and triple energizer.  It's not just a digestive issue here but a calling from the fire element to be nourished by a broader spectrum of flavors.  

So make your Valentine's chocolate today less about a sweet and more about a bracing bite of 85% or more serious cacao.  In the words of Hart Crane, from his poem "The Heart" - a piece many might not associate with a celebration of love and romance - but to me is a revelation of raw self-acceptance: 

 I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."