Home Remedies

In our society, food is usually viewed as the cause of ailments: eating fatty foods will increase your risk of cancer, overindulging on your favorite unhealthy food can cause you to gain unwanted weight, or the ingestion of certain foods cause an allergic reaction. In a culture of such privilege, we allow food to be the cause of problems, but in other countries where food is scarce, the only problem with food is its absence. Rarely, do we acknowledge that food plays many helpful roles in our lives.

As someone who is just starting to get sick, I have heard it all from my friends and family members. "I have the perfect tea to help clear up your throat," "Let me make you a concoction for congestion. It has cayenne pepper, lemon, and honey." "Have you tried swallowing a clove of garlic?" "Just drink orange juice. And LOTS of it." Perhaps this goes a bit with MFK Fisher's story of everyone having their own special talent; every family has their own home remedies for staving off sickness.

In my family, my grandmother likes to make us swallow whole cloves of garlic to help prevent illness, or at least to get it to run away with its tail between its legs. My sister and my friend, Emily, have many suggested teas for my poor achey-breaky throat. And another friend, Elise, suggested the cayenne pepper concoction, which made me change the subject very quickly. Personally, I always liked the tea, ginger ale, or juice solutions best, I find that trying to drown the sickness with a proliferation of liquids is much less painful than some of the other options.

As I was encountered with so many homemade medicines, I started to think about food in relation to sickness. Please take the time to ponder the following questions, as I did.

• What are your favorite home remedies? Why are they your favorite?
• Which ones work and why do they work? 
• Is this all psychological and just the fact that we believe in our odd faux medicines is the reason they work? 

Thus far, I have no idea if there is a true reason why our solutions work. Anyway, let me know what you think. Who knows? Perhaps the cure to colds may be hidden in your comments.