“Actually, one of the reasons I wanted Indian food this week is because I was sick and a lot of the spices they use are natural medicines,” said my good friend Kaji Shrestha when I was talking to him on the phone this week. Sure, there are plenty of folks around this campus who are super groovy and into herbal remedies and natural healing. So the idea of spices and herbs is not necessarily that unique. Except that Kaji is not another Whitman hippie but a pre-med student at Michigan State University.

So if you are coming down with a cold or just the general “plague” which ravages through the dorms every year, why make a curry? First of all, tumeric (the spice that gives curry its yellow color) has anti-depressant properties that will make you feel good straight off. The antimicrobial chemicals in that tumeric will then start to fight off some of the nasty stuff that is making you feel sick. On the long term, preventative health front, tumeric has chemicals that have been shown to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s, liver disorders and several types of cancer.

Many of the chemicals found in tumeric have only recently been recognized by modern western scientists for their medicinal properties. Many drug companies are especially interested in developing synthetic copies of those chemicals to market as pharmaceuticals. Even though modern medicine is just starting to look to food for medicines, the healing properties of tumeric and other foods has been known for eons by people all over the world. There is an entire spiritual/medicinal branch based in Hindu culture known as Ayurveda, which revolves primarily around the healing properties of spices, minerals and food. Most of these beliefs are considered to be superstitious, but more and more often science is confirming these beliefs to be true.

Our own culture has plenty of folklore about food and health. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” eating oranges in order to get more vitamin C, chocolate ice cream to feel better after a break up and garlic to help us feel better when we have a cold. Some of these are rooted in, or have been backed up by, modern science. Garlic, for example, actually does have antimicrobial properties like tumeric. On the other hand, the high level of vitamin C in oranges is mostly myth; you would be much better to eat some sweet potatoes, which also keep considerably better and can actually grow in Walla Walla.

The value of this herbal knowledge and folklore cannot be underestimated. Just because we can get all sorts of medicines over the counter or from doctors when we have health problems does not mean that those medicines will necessarily always be that easy to access, or that we always have the resources to purchase them. If you are feeling tight on cash a trip to the drug store for some Sudafed can seem like a big deal, but throwing some extra hot peppers in food that you have to eat anyway might be less of a sacrifice.

There are also the various foods that offer preventative care. It goes without saying that eating good food can have some fabulous long-term health benefits, but there are also much more explicit benefits. Garlic and onions, besides being essential for 90 percent of delicious meals, help to lower blood pressure and bad cholesterol levels.

Perhaps rather than following an often incorrect and misleading food “pyramid” from the USDA, we should all have a chart of foods with medicinal properties in our kitchens. Some doctors are already starting to recommend diet changes to help patients with diseases that are not generally considered to be diet related. This return to the medical properties of food harkens back to Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who said, “Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food.” Most importantly to me, if given the choice between artificial grape-flavored cough syrup and lentil daal, I’ll take the daal.