Do you have a headache? Eat some birdbrains for dinner and your headache will go away. Do you want beautiful skin? Put a spoonful of ground pearls into your soup. Your skin will be beautiful. Is your hair turning grey? Eat black rice every day, and you will not have grey hair. Eat birdbrains, pearls, and black rice? some people ask, How strange! But for many Chinese people, birdbrains, pearls and black rice are not strange things to eat; they are good things to eat. They are good medicines, too. Many Chinese believe that food can be a medicine. They believe that eating birdbrains, for example, stops headaches, soup with ground pearls is good for the skin, and black rice stops hair from turning grey. Food that is medicine is called medicinal food. The Chinese have eaten medicinal food and spices for centuries. Ginger, for example, is a common spice in Chinese cooking. Ginger gives food a nice flavour. The Chinese began to use ginger many years ago. They used ginger not because it tasted good. They used ginger because it was medicinal. Ginger, they thought, was good for the digestion. It also helped people who had colds. Pepper and garlic, too, were probably medicines a long time ago. Some people do not believe that food and spices are good medicines. They want to buy their medicine in drug stores, not in supermarkets. Other people want to try medicinal food. They say, Maybe medicinal food cannot help me. But it cannot hurt me, either. People can try medicinal food at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, California. The restaurant serves only medicinal food. The menus at the restaurant have a list of dinners. Next to each dinner, there is information about the food. The information helps people order. Queen's Secret, for example, is one dinner at the restaurant. Meat from a chicken with black skin is in the dinner. It is for women who want to look young. Lover's Soup is for people whose marriages are unhappy. The soup has dinosaur bones in it, and it helps people's love lives. Even the drinks at the restaurant are medicinal. One drink is deer tail wine. It gives people more energy. Alan Lau is the owner of the restaurant. Mr. Lau says, Some people try medicinal food one time and then say, It did not work. But think about this: when your doctor prescribes a medicine, you take the medicine for five days, or for ten days, or maybe for weeks. It is the same with medicinal food. You have to eat the food many times before it begins to help. Mr. Lau believes that medicinal food works; he eats medicinally every day. Mr. Lau also owns a store that sells medicinal food. The store is next to the restaurant. People who want to cook medicinal food at home can buy it at the store. In the picture, Mr. Lau is working at his store. He is weighing something for a customer. Is it a spice? Is it a medicine? Or is it both?
