Talking when you eat is bad for you, and other Chinese beliefs

Xiong Yang is an independent journalist covering food, and its broader connections to culture, history and politics.“What did your family talk about at the dinner table?”Snug under the Tuscan sun, at a writing retreat on a permaculture farm outside Florence, I was ready to mine my fondest food memories. For a moment, scenes from films and television flashed across my mind: a montage of vivid dinner conversations and emotional check-ins, stitched together from various coming-of-age stories.The only problem was that I could not claim any of those vignettes as my own. I squinted and dug deeper, into countless meals with my family. It seemed our focus never shifted far from the meal itself. We cared too much about the fundamental function of the meal – nutrition – to ask one another about our day.“When eating, he did not converse. When in bed, he did not speak.” The Analects of Confucius, advising silence in aid of digestion and sleep, may well have anticipated our table manners. Although the Chinese philosopher was never directly quoted at home, the logic feels familiar.In my family, drinks were also absent from the dinner table, even something as benign as warm water. As a child, I assumed my parents set out to discourage sugary beverages but despotically banned all other drinks too. They insisted that too much liquid interfered with digestion.Only later would I discover that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) shares the same suspicion. In TCM, digestion depends on the yang vital energy of the spleen and stomach, a kind of metabolic warmth that can be dampened by excess liquid. The body is understood to be a delicate system whose balance should not be disturbed unnecessarily.