As the saying goes, “The food is what matters to the people.” The Start of Autumn is a very significant solar term and surely is linked with food! On that day, usually people will weigh themselves and compare their weight to the one at the Start of Summer. If one lost weight during the summer, then at the beginning of autumn, he or she needs to flesh himself out by eating delicious food of many different kinds, especially meat.

The eating customs at the Start of Autumn differ in different regions. In Beijing City and Hebei Province, to celebrate, common people will eat stew while more decent families will have boiled pork, stew meat in soy sauce, meat dumplings, stewed chicken or duck and sauté fish with brown sauce, etc.

In Hangzhou City, the custom of eating peaches at the Start of Autumn once prevailed. One peach a head, the peach-stone should be kept till the New Year's Eve and thrown into the stove, burned into ash. People believed that in this way, plagues could be prevented for the whole year.

However, to those farmers who are at the mercy of the forces of nature, the Start of Autumn doesn’t merely mean eating. It is time to gather corps, and if it rains then, a good harvest is expectable.

Traditional Chinese medicine suggests that not all food is suitable to eat in autumn. To set off the autumn dryness, food that nourishes the Yin and the lung and vegetables and fruits with sour taste are recommended. Avoid eating too much food with spicy flavors, such as shallot or ginger. Foods that do good to the lungs include: lotus seed, lotus root, yam, mushroom and tomato, etc.

Due to the foolish intake of cold drinks and food in summer, deficiency of the spleen and stomach may occur around the Start of Autumn. Thus, to avoid the abrupt overburdening of the digestive organs caused by fleshing out, an adaptive period for the spleen and stomach is necessary. Some easily digested foods such as fish, lean meat, egg, lotus seed, dairy food and fresh vegetables and fruits are pretty good options, I guess.