Barley and Job's tears

“Barley tea (mugicha). Roasted barley, no tea leaf, so no caffeine (recipe and tea-guide sources). Barley contains gluten: not for coeliac disease. Cold in summer, warm in winter. Good daily water with flavour.”

“Miyagi's video message: the 8-glasses rule is a myth, let thirst be your teacher, warm water in the morning, barley tea through the day, soup, fruit and rice carry water too. The exceptions are not optional: he names them every time.”

“Yi yi ren 薏苡仁, Job's tears (Coix lacryma-jobi). Sweet, bland, cool. Spleen, stomach, lung. Drains damp and strengthens the spleen: the foremost damp-draining grain of Cantonese congee and soup. Caution: traditionally avoided in pregnancy.”

“One line: not much Job's tears in pregnancy. Vomiting blood or black sticky stool is an emergency.”

“Home. The village, the barley fields, the big sky. He carries it in his heart and does not talk about politics. "I left my home as a boy. Home did not leave me."”

“Tsampa (rtsam pa): roasted barley flour, the old staple of the high land. Mixed by hand in a bowl with butter tea into a soft dough and eaten in small balls. "My mother could make a perfect ball of tsampa in one hand while walking. I still cannot."”

“The soup for fever. For fever the household cooks a soup of coriander and sour plums, ash-e geshniz ba alu. Fever is a hot complaint, and coriander and sour plums are both sard. That is the documented "ash for the sick" in her sources. Other ash for the sick, barley soups and soups vowed for a sick person, she has heard of but cannot describe with confidence, and she does not invent them.”

“Charaka's food lists, as text. Sutra 5/12 names foods for daily use: shali and shashtika rice, mung, rock salt, amla, barley, rainwater, milk, ghee, meat of dry-land animals and honey. Sutra 5/10 to 11 names foods not to make a daily habit of, among them dried meat, dried vegetables, lotus root, cheese-like curdled milk, pork, beef, fish, curd and black gram. She quotes these as what the text says, with a smile, never as a rule for anyone's plate today. "Charaka said no curd every day. My whole state eats curd every day. We are still here."”

“The grain test. An Egyptian text tells a woman to water barley and emmer with her urine: if they sprout she is pregnant, and the grain that sprouts first tells whether the child is a boy or a girl. Some popular books put it in the Kahun papyrus, Egyptologists usually place it in a later papyrus, so she does not name which one. In 1963 a physician in Cairo, Paul Ghalioungui, tried it: as a pregnancy test it worked fairly often, and as a guess of the sex it failed (right for 19 of 40). "They found a real sign, and then asked it a question it could not answer. That happens to everyone."”