Sustainable Health Nutshell: For the healthiest kitchen (and fewer doctor visits this winter!), cook according to the season’s available produce and Ayurvedic time of year, use spices and recipes to correct your individual imbalances and constitution, and use only select animal products with as much local organic produce as you can. Enjoy nourishing yourself!

A new acquaintance expressed skepticism about my “Ayurvedic Nutrition and Cooking Classes” (although he offered his work space as a possible venue!), based on his past experience with being told he needed to learn Indian cooking to understand Ayurveda. It was fun to explain the truth- all cooking is Ayurvedic, just like all of everything is Ayurvedic! The idea is, since Ayurveda is based in principles with quantum physics correlations, everything really is ‘Ayurvedic,’ but the knowledge is useful in that it recognizes ways to positively create health as well as things that can block energy and flow and cause less constructive energies to accumulate and become out of balance.

The most important basic principles are the ‘qualities’ of things. Qualities like heavy/light, dry/moist, cold/hot. Qualities like those are found in everything, but for right now we’re just focusing on food, as well as how it relates to our own imbalances, which can be described with those qualities also. The following is an over-simplified series of examples, but will help you get a feel for this: Say you tend towards intensity, focus, and have fast efficient digestion- you might have more of the heat quality in your constitution (Pitta). In excess/imbalance, this could tend towards irritability, heartburn, diarrhea, or high blood pressure. So avoiding foods that are hot, oily (fuel to the fire!), and overly light (think kindling instead of logs on the fire) would be helpful. If you tend toward extremely regular digestion, are strong and solid, and are dependably careful in decision making, those are cool, earthy qualities (Kapha). In excess that may show up as holding onto weight, indecision, or inertia. Avoiding heavy cold foods and making sure the internal fire is working well (exercise) are helpful to balance those issues. Next, if you tend to get excited about many things, are good at multitasking, tend towards irregular schedules and enjoy lots of variety, those are airy-light qualities, and like air/space, changeable and ethereal (Vata). In imbalance, that can lead to anxiety, lack of focus, forgetting to eat, and a tendency towards colds and flus. This is the most common imbalance encouraged by our high-speed, high-tech culture. To balance this, too much very light or very heavy hard to digest food is avoided, favoring warm, moist, grounding foods at regular times.

As we slide into Autumn, those types of Vata-balancing foods (warm, moist, grounding, and simple) are also suggested since Autumn is considered a Vata time of year and changes of season tend to aggravate those types of imbalances. Now, to address the reason for this post directly- every single food has qualities, whether you eat Indian style, Mexican style, Greek style, Polish style, etc. Each style of cuisine favors a predominance of certain qualities of food (i.e. butter in French cooking- very heavy and cold, so would aggravate Kapha imbalances), but every single kind can be modified to accommodate different grains, different main vegetables, or different spice proportions, and every single kind can be made with minimal animal products, and overheating oils is harmful no matter what you’re frying or sauteing or baking or roasting.

[Ok, except say Bushmen in Africa, or Eskimos, or Mongolian Steppe people... so if you move/rebuild your yurt often and move with herds or need to survive -100 degree wind chill and 6 months of hard winter, different rules clearly apply to you. These suggestions are for people that are privileged enough to be able choose our style of everything... to be 'sensitive to gluten' and have alternatives or to be 'vegan' purely by choice or to think the 'paleo diet' is worth trying out- those options are SUCH a gift.]

Back to topic: let me give a list of simple things to remember that can get you started-first a few basic foods, then spices: Beans are ‘light and dry’ which means to balance them they need to be soaked and cooked very well and warming spices like cumin added to help digest them. Vegetables like tomatoes (especially paste), peppers and eggplant are ‘hot.’ Squashes, asparagus, okra, and cucumber are ‘moist and cool’. Rice is ‘light and cool’, wheat is ‘heavy and cool’, millet and rye are ‘very light’, oats are ‘medium light/heavy’. Soy is ‘heavy and cool’, much like meat but less potential for toxicity since it’s plant protein, but still can be clogging in excess. Fruit is generally ‘cool’, so add spices and cook fruits in the mornings and evenings, soak dried fruits, and in the special case of melons, “eat them alone or leave them alone!” Bananas in particular are very ‘heavy, sweet and cooling’, so unless it’s super hot out they’re best to avoid (from an environmental perspective also a good idea). Olive oil is ‘cool and light’ (for an oil), ghee is ‘cool and heavy’, sesame oil is ‘hot’, and coconut oil is very ‘heavy and cold’.

Here are tastes and qualities a few common spices, but keep in mind most have more than one quality, these are just the obvious main ones to guide your food balancing- spices can change the entire balance of a meal instantly so using spices for your imbalance is a quick way to personalize your food if you need to cook for more than one person: Pungent/hot= cayenne, cloves, turmeric, cumin, oregano, black pepper, ginger, fenugreek, mustard, cinnamon, tulsi/basil. Astringent or Bitter/cool= cilantro, coriander, sage, rosemary, pomegranate, coffee. Sweet/cool= fennel, cardamom, anise, cinnamon. Salt is considered hot.

So that should start you off! Check out what I made for lunch today below- it was on the ‘hot’ side spices wise, but pretty balanced on the whole. Try different combinations for yourself and see if you can become aware of how your body reacts differently- that can point you towards your imbalance tendencies and can head them off before they begin to cause symptoms! Pick vegetables are in season- even if they aren’t quite local, and see how your body reacts differently. Becoming more in tune with your own nature and with the environment around you will help prevent and correct imbalances, and can be delicious!

Lunch today= cleaning out the fridge and counter before the farmer’s market today at Harding School (~1 and a half servings, which I unfortunately ate all of- #notthebestchoice): rice noodles with cottage cheese (= easy-to-digest ‘fettucine alfredo’) with sauteed veggie sauce: olive oil, fennel seeds, turmeric, sage, oregano, rosemary, black pepper, a bit of water, 1/3 onion (from my friend Johanna’s Finley Farms), a small japanese eggplant (from my friend Carla’s backyard), half a giant heirloom tomato and arugula and basil (from The Garden Of…), and a few leftover marinated artichokes, topped with some shredded parmesan cheese. Delicious, super filling, good because I ate the cold/ heavy cheese at mid-day, and the doshic balance was mostly even: nightshades, onion, and vinegar (in the artichokes) is heating/Pitta-aggravating, but it was balanced by the bitter greens (bitter is cooling) and noodles with fresh cheese (those two also grounded Vata along with the warm temperature) and the overall lightness and warmness and spices were good for Kapha. However it balanced out it was pretty darn good. Try that or variations and let me know what you think and how your body responds to different combinations of foods!