Mouthing Off | How the right food can keep you cool in East Asia’s humid summers (and it’s not ice cream)
- Chinese medicine recommends cooling foods such as hot winter melon soup in the hot summer months, but salads and ice cream are out
- People from tropical countries eat chillis and spices to bring on the sweat, while southern Europeans and North Africans eat food that is less spicy
It’s hard to build up an appetite when the weather is as hot as it is now in subtropical Hong Kong. Five minutes outside in this sweltering July humidity and my shirt is soaked and I feel like my forehead is already fried. About the only thing I want to eat is ice cream.
It’s no surprise that most of us alter our dining habits in the summertime. In general, we all eat a little less and choose dishes that are not as heavy. My palate craves more foods like sushi, cold noodles or a refreshing, icy gazpacho.
Being Chinese though, food is never a simple matter. From a very young age, we’re told we need to regulate our internal core or, as I described it when I was a kid, my stomach’s feng shui.
Chinese medicine practitioners always stress the need for a balanced chi, or energy, between cold and hot. Winter melon is considered cooling, so a big bowl of hot double-boiled melon soup is supposedly far better to lower your inside temperature than eating mango, pineapple or lychees, which are considered heating.
Furthermore, no matter how hot it is outside, no grandmother wants you to eat raw salads because they think it may cool down your system too much. God forbid you may end up with cold feet and cold hands this time of the year. Yeah, I wish.