If you are a student of Feng Shui, then you will see opportunities everywhere to further your learning.  If you are a student of Feng Shui who enjoys food and cooking, you start to think about food in terms of energy and chi.  A simple shopping trip becomes a lesson in selecting the produce that has the most chi left in it.  In the grocery store, this means looking through the heaps of apples and being able to see the ones that have retained the most energy, or to put it another way, which ones are the freshest.  If you practice, you will learn to see that some apples seem to have a little glow about them, their color is a little more vivid, and they stand out among the others. If you really pay attention to your five senses you will become good at this.  If you would  like a more extreme example, think of the difference between canned spinach (ugh!) and fresh spinach.

The people you identify as “really good cooks” are the people who look for and use the best and freshest ingredients.  If you start out with ingredients that still have a lot of the energy they had while still growing and alive, you are pretty much guaranteed a great result.

“When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.” (Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food, p.3)

When people mention the best fish they ever ate, it is often in the context of camping or fishing, and the fish they are eating is the one they just caught some hours ago.  There is no need for fancy sauces and spices because the fish is so fresh and full of life that it is deliciously satisfying on its own.  Lengthy preparation methods and racks full of seasonings are simply unnecessary.

I’m convinced that the underlying principles of good cooking are the same everywhere.  These principles have less to do with recipes and techniques than they do with gathering good ingredients, which for me is the essence of cooking.  Whenever I give cooking demonstrations, I put everything I will be cooking on display, and the audience is always wide-eyed and amazed at how beautiful it all is.  They ask, “Where did you get that?!,” and I answer “At your farmer’s market – and you can get it too!” (Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food, p.5)

The sooner we consume produce after it is harvested, the more life is in it.  The life goes into us when we eat it.  We can easily see the chi in the produce that is offered at the Farmer’s Market because it is more recently harvested than the produce in the grocery store, and I’m not just talking about whether or not something looks “fresh” as opposed to wilted or colorless.  There is nothing “wrong” with those apples in the grocery store, but people who shop at the Farmer’s Market will notice more often than others that the apples in the grocery store look like they’ve been in storage for awhile, because they have learned what live food looks like.   Not only does the fresher apple look brighter and more enticing, it smells and tastes better, feels better in the mouth.  Fruits and vegetables that are in season give us our best memories of the taste and experience of eating them.

If I am working with a client who is having health issues, or if their house does not receive or hold much energy, I recommend that they do not try to store too much produce in their kitchen, but instead that they shop for the freshest produce possible and use it all up every day or two.  They will get more benefit from the food this way.  I have seen first hand how quickly fruit and vegetables wither if they are stored in an environment that is deficient in chi.