Yǎngshēng shíjì 養生食忌
Dietary Avoidances for Nourishing Life edited by 胡文煥 Hú Wénhuàn (fl. Wànlì, Hángzhōu publisher).
About the work
A one-juan compendium of dietary incompatibilities (shíjì 食忌), organised under canonical categorial headings: wǔgǔ 五穀 (Five Grains), wǔwèi 五味 (Five Tastes / condiments), wǔguǒ 五果 (Five Fruits), wǔcài 五菜 (Five Vegetables), liùchù 六畜 (Six Domestic Animals). Each item is supplied with a short list of disallowed combinations and their pathological consequences. The framework is a systematisation of the Sùwèn doctrine of food-incompatibility, drawing on the Běncǎo pharmacopoeial tradition and on the dietary-cautionary literature exemplified by 孟詵 Mèng Shēn’s 食療本草 Shíliáo běncǎo and 孫思邈 Sūn Sīmiǎo’s Qiānjīn shízhì 千金食治 (KR3eo038).
Representative entries:
- Late rice combined with cocklebur (蒼耳): causes sudden heart pain or “running attachment” syndrome. Late rice with horse meat: provokes chronic disease.
- Aged-stored rice with horse meat: provokes chronic disease.
- Buckwheat with pork: causes hot-wind syndrome.
- Vinegar must not be eaten with clam meat.
- Black sugar with crucian carp: produces gānchóng parasites.
- Orange and crab together: causes “soft abscess”.
- Persimmon and crab: causes abdominal pain and severe diarrhoea.
- Yams and carp / crucian carp: produces deficiency-fatigue and powerlessness.
- Dates with raw onion / honey: discord among the Five Viscera.
- Mustard greens with rabbit meat: produces accumulations.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw reprint preserves no separate xù; the work opens directly with the Wǔgǔ shíjì 五穀食忌 section.
Abstract
The work belongs to the Hú Wénhuàn editorial-publishing programme (cf. KR3eo011, KR3eo014, KR3eo018, KR3eo019, KR3eo020, KR3eo027, KR3eo034, KR3eo036). It collects the negative pole of the dietetic-medical tradition — the catalogue of foods to be avoided in combination — into a single accessible compendium for household use. The material derives substantially from the Sòng-Yuán dietary pharmacopoeia (the Shèngjì zǒnglù 聖濟總錄 dietary chapter; 忽思慧 Hū Sīhuì’s Yǐnshàn zhèngyào 飲膳正要 (KR3eo040); the Běncǎo gāngmù of 李時珍 Lǐ Shízhēn) and is one of the more compact late-Míng presentations of the dietary-cautionary lore.
The date bracket 1590–1602 reflects Hú’s principal publishing window in Hángzhōu.
Translations and research
- Eugene Anderson, Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
- Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson, A Soup for the Qan (Leiden: Brill, 2010), index on dietary incompatibilities.
- Frédéric Obringer, Le riz et l’odeur des hommes: alimentation et géopolitique en Chine (Paris, 2014).
- 馬烈光, Zhōng-yī yǎng-shēng kāng-fù xué cí-diǎn (Běijīng, 2007), s.v. 食忌.
- No substantial Western-language treatment of this specific title located.
Other points of interest
The list of “vinegar must not be eaten with clam” and similar prohibitions has been carefully studied by modern Chinese-food-safety historians as a record of empirical observations on biogenic-amine and histamine-poisoning interactions — many of the prohibited combinations correspond to recognized food-borne illness risks (e.g., the bacterial proliferation in clam meat in the presence of acidic media).
Companion: Yǐnshí xūzhī 飲食須知 (KR3eo044) is the Yuán-era systematic dietary-incompatibility compendium by 賈銘 Jiǎ Míng.