Do you have a headache? Take an aspirin or eat bird brains. Do you want beautiful skin? Use skin cream or eat pearls. Is your hair turning gray? Color your hair or eat black rice. “Eat bird brains, pearls, and black rice?” some people ask. “How strange!” But for many Chinese people, bird brains, pearls, and black rice are not strange things to eat. Instead, they are good medicines. Food that people use for medicines is called medical(药用的) food. The Chinese have eaten medicinal food and spices(香辛料) for centuries. Ginger, for example, is a common spice in Chinese cooking. Ginger gives food a nice flavor. The Chinese began to use ginger many years ago. They used ginger not because it tasted good. They used ginger because it was medicinal. Ginger, they thought, was good for the digestion. It also helped people who had colds. Pepper and garlic, too, were probably medicines a long time ago. Some people don’t believe that food and spices are good medicines. They want to buy their medicine in drugstores, not in supermarkets. Other people want to try medicinal food. They say, “Maybe medicinal food can’t help me. But it can’t hurt me, either.” People can try medicinal food at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, California. The restaurant serves medicinal food. The menus at the restaurant have a list of dinners. Next to each dinner there is information about the food. The information helps people order “Queen’s Secret,” for example, is one dinner at the restaurant. This dinner has meat from chickens with black feathers. It is for women who want to look young. 小题1:All of the followings are common spices in Chinese cooking EXCEPT .
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