¡Qué maravillosa!

A tasty trip through Hispanic holiday foods By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach In Madison Magazine, December 2006
Recipes and shopping tips follow this article
Photo: Martha Busse

When Melania Alvarez tells me how to make cochinita pibil, a Christmas dish from her native Mexico, she gets excited just talking about it. “Oh, my mouth is watering!” she exclaims. She talks me through each step, and calls back a couple of times with some tips she forgot.

I must sound puzzled at her description of some of the more exotic ingredients, because the next day, I find them in a shopping bag hanging on my doorknob. There’s also an authentic comal – a steel griddle for warming tortillas. It’s a gift, for my efforts to share a dish that’s dear to her. The recipe comes out fabulous. The comal works great.

Holiday food customs matter to people. Here are some favorites of Madisonians from around the Latin American diaspora. ¡Que maravillosa!

MEXICO
Rosca de Reyes (wreath of kings) and Cochinita Pibil (barbecue pork soft tacos)
Alvarez, an anthropology Ph.D. candidate at UW-Madison, remembers fondly the holiday celebrations she grew up with. Dec. 16 kicks off Las Posadas, a nightly neighborhood-wide reenactment in song of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging, culminating in a party each night at a different neighbor’s house. Festive dishes include ponche con piquete (punch with sting), a fruity, alcoholic concoction. For the children, there’s a piñata filled with peanuts, oranges, tangerines, sugar canes and candy.

Presents arrive on Epiphany (Jan. 6) courtesy of the three Wise Men – not Santa – in remembrance of the gifts they brought Jesus. On that day is served the rosca de reyes (wreath of kings), “a big oval wreath of egg bread with dry fruit decorations and sprinkled sugar on top,” explains Alvarez. “Hidden inside, there is a little ceramic doll which represents the Baby Jesus.”

But the main feast of Christmastime in Mexico, as throughout most of Latin America, is held the night of Christmas Eve. The Alvarez spread was lavish: “We had tamales, romeritos [a green vegetable] with shrimp, pork with plum sauce, bacalao [salt cod with chili peppers], and lots more. Our family loves to eat. In Mexico, food is just an incredible thing. There’s so much variety.” Christmas Day itself is “low-key,” she says – lots of lounging and leftovers.

One of Alvarez’s favorite holiday dishes is cochinita pibil, a kind of tangy pork barbecue served taco style with pickled red onions. Although her family hails from Monterrey in Mexico’s north, this Christmas specialty from south Mexico – an area with a vastly different culinary style – was always on her family’s holiday table. Here’s how it came to be there.

Born in Yucatán in the 1860s, Doña Aurora Canto chronicled the marvelous foods she grew up with, and developed recipes for preparing them in a modern, urban kitchen. Her granddaughter, Melba Sanchez, and her husband, Alonso, opened a restaurant in central Mexico, serving these recipes.

In the 1960s, the Sanchezes befriended a family that had newly moved south to Mexico City. The clan’s matriarch bonded with their little girl – Melania – who loved to hear stories about life in old Yucatán. And Doña Aurora shared with Melania’s family her method for cochinita pibil.

The classic form of the dish involves marinating a whole suckling pig in spices and orange juice, wrapping it in banana leaves, and roasting it in a pit dug into the earth.
This stovetop version from Doña Aurora, however, is easy. “It’s a foolproof recipe,” Alvarez says. “No matter what you do, it’s very hard that you ruin this thing. Put some on your tortilla, add some onion. You close your taco and – heaven! It’s good.”

Cochinitas pibil make a perfect buffet food. Just keep the pork hot in a chafing dish, and put the red onions nearby in a pretty bowl. Warm a stack of tortillas and keep them hot in foil or in a tortilla warmer.

HONDURAS
Torejas (sweet corn puffs)
Christmas Eve dinner in Honduras, just north of Nicaragua, features nacatamales – pork or chicken tamales wrapped in banana leaves, rather than the corn husks-wrapped tamales of Mexico that Americans are more familiar with. And for dessert, there’s always torejas – delicate little spongey disks dripping with rich, sweet cane syrup.

“Everybody has torejas and coffee,” says DeStephen, who was a dentist in Honduras. She came to the States two years ago with her husband, a clinical engineer with Rayovac. “They’re served right after dinner at room temperature. They’re very popular, and very easy. Very nice.”

In other Hispanic countries, “torejas” is a word meaning French toast, or sometimes just toast. But in Honduras, it specifically means these tiny fried corn flour cakes. (Fans of Indian food can consider these gulab jamun for the Western hemisphere.)
The most exotic ingredient here is piloncillo, a cone of evaporated cane syrup, a staple at Latin markets. The label IDs it as “brown sugar,” but it’s not quite the same as American brown sugar, which is just white sugar with a little molasses stirred in. This is the real thing – the pure, unrefined juice of the crushed cane. Compared to our brown sugar, the flavor is rich, hefty, whole.

CHILE
Pan de Pascua (holy season bread) and Cola de Mono (monkey’s tail)
Fruitcake and monkey’s tail: it’s the instant Chilean Christmas celebration kit. “If you say this combination to any Chilean, they will say, ‘Oh, my, how did you know?’” says Paulette Berthelon. “Everywhere you go, everyone offers it to you. You just keep eating and drinking that through New Year’s Eve.”

Pan de Pascua, or Chilean fruitcake, translates as “bread of the holy season.” Dense, rich and bready, it’s sort of a cross between our fruitcake (less sweet, and not phony) and German stollen.

Cola de mono, meaning monkey’s tail, is the Chilean cultural equivalent of eggnog. This sweet drink is made with spiced milk and coffee and spiked with aguardiente, a Chilean liquor distilled from sugar cane.

Eaten in tandem, you’d think the two sweet treats would just cloy and cancel each other out, but in fact they combine in transcendent spicy harmony. “You eat and drink these two together, and – I don’t know, it’s just right,” says Berthelon.”It’s so good.”

Pan de Pascua is thought to originate from regions in the south of Chile settled by Germans in the early twentieth century, and Berthelon’s favorite recipe is the family treasure of a friend whose great-grandfather arrived in Chile around that time.

RECIPES AND SHOPPING TIPS

Rosca de Reyes In Madison, the Panaderia Marimar (270-0711; 1325 Greenway Cross) bakes delicious roscas de reyes in time for Epiphany. You can call ahead to reserve one, and arrange to pick it up at any of Marimar’s three mercado (market) locations around town.

Here’s a group of party-friendly recipes: every one of these can be prepared days in advance, and most get better with time. Enjoy!

Mexican Cochinitas Pibil
Alvarez recommends making cochinita pibil a day or even a week ahead of time. “It gets better and better,” she says. The pickled onions mellow and improve with time in the fridge, also.
Achiote is a garlicky condiment made chiefly from crushed annatto seeds. Annatto’s flavor is mild, but its color is a spectacular orange. (Used in tiny amounts, annatto gives cheddar and other orange cheeses their familiar ruddy hue.) Achiote is easy to find at any Latino food store. It comes in a little box about the size of a bar of soap, usually sporting a jaunty drawing of – a roast suckling pig.

Banana leaves are also uncommon to the American kitchen, but readily available at a mercado.

In Yucatán, a special orange, the naranja agria (bitter orange), is juiced for the marinade, but, says Alvarez, “You can only get it in Yucatán.” This recipe uses vinegar plus orange juice to duplicate the super-sour quality of naranja agria.

Tortilla warmers, cases to keep your heated tortillas hot, are available inexpensively at most Latino specialty mercados and tiendas (stores). Yue Wah (2328 S. Park St., 257-9338), a multiethnic supermarket, is also an excellent source for Latino groceries and accoutrements.

Cohinita Pibil Recipe

3 pounds pork shoulder butt roast
3/4 bar achiote (annatto) paste
2–3 feet banana leaves
5 oranges, juiced (or 1 1/2 cups OJ)
3/4 cup white vinegar, plus more cups vinegar
1–2 red onions
1 lime
1–4 serrano or habanero peppers
plenty of corn tortillas

Pork
Combine juice and 3/4 cup vinegar. Dissolve the achiote into the liquid. Cut the pork into six or more pieces. Marinate the pork in the achiote mixture overnight. A zippered freezer bag – inside another bag or a bowl just in case – works well.

Transfer the meat and marinade into a heavy pot. (Iron or enameled iron are perfect; uncoated aluminum is not a good choice, because the acid will pit it.) Loosely wrap the meat into foot-long lengths of banana leaf. Add water to cover. Simmer, covered, 3–5 hours, until very tender – enough that you can easily tear it into little strips with a fork. (Some people like to use an electric crockpot for this slow cooking; others say it just isn’t the same.) Discard the banana leaves. Shred the pork. Keep the lid off and cook liquid down until it’s juicy, but not soupy. Keep in mind that when it cools, much of the liquid will be absorbed. Mash another teaspoon or tablespoon of achiote with a little vinegar and stir it in, to freshen up the taste. Excellent right away or reheated. Be careful not to let this get scorched: “Burnt annatto tastes terrible,” says Alvarez.

Onion condiment
Slice the onion into thin rings. Place in a glass bowl or other container suitable for fairly long-term refrigeration. Add the juice of a lime. Add vinegar to cover. Slice the pepper(s) lengthwise and add them – as many as you think you will want the heat of! Refrigerate at least a day before serving. The sharpness of the onions mellows over time.

To serve Over low heat, warm tortillas on a griddle or an authentic flat steel comal (available at mercados). Make a soft taco by putting some pork on a tortilla, adding red onion (lift it out of the vinegar), and folding the tortilla in half.


Honduran Torejas

3 eggs, separated
3 tablespoons corn flour (finer than corn meal)
3 piloncillos
3 cups water
Oil for frying (about 1 quart)

Woodman’s carries big, cheap jugs of peanut oil. With its high smoking point and unobtrusive flavor, is a good choice for frying. It can easily be strained and reused after frying torejas.

Beat yolks till thick and creamy, like mayonnaise. Beat egg whites till stiff peaks form. Stir whites and yolks together. Stir in corn flour.

Fry in 1" of hot (375º) oil, dropping batter from a teaspoon. Fry torejas until golden brown, flipping once. It doesn’t take long. By the time you fill the pan, it’s time to flip the first ones you dropped in. By the time you’ve turned them all, it’s time to start removing them to a rack. Cool on rack, then remove to paper towels for better drainage. At this point, they’re feather-light, mostly air – the better to soak up the delicious piloncillo syrup.

Place in the syrup. Refrigerate overnight. Serve about three torejas at room temperature in lots of syrup in a little dish.

Piloncillo syrup In a saucepan over low heat, place piloncillos in water and cover. The dried cane syrup will dissolve into a thin syrup after several minutes.


Pan De Pasuca
Holy Season Bread, or Chilean Fruitcake
Most Panes de Pascua are yeasted breads, time-consuming constructions involving various kneadings and risings. This one, however, is leavened with baking powder, so it’s much simpler to make. It’s legacy, however, is authentic, dating back generations in a German family of southern Chile.

1 cup of butter, room temperature
1/2 cup milk
4 eggs, separated
2 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon anise extract
1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups chopped walnuts (not too small, break every piece in half)
3/4 cup almonds (optional, broken in pieces as you do with the walnuts)
1 1/2 cups golden raisins
1 cup mixed candied fruit
1/2 cup brandy or rum
1 teaspoon white vinegar

Preheat oven to 325º. Grease two deep 9" round cake pans or one 9" springform pan. Spray pan(s) with cooking spray. For extra nonstick-ness, line the bottom and sides of the pan with foil, then spray.

Combine the fruits and nuts in a medium bowl. Toss in a handful of flour and mix to coat. The flour keeps the fruits and nuts from sinking to the bottom of the cake.

Beat butter in a large bowl until creamy. Add all the sugar and beat until
light and fluffy. Add honey. Beat in egg yolks one at a time, beating well at each addition. Add vanilla. Stir in lemon peel and egg whites. Add some of the milk.
Sift flour, baking powder and spices and add to butter mixture alternately
with brandy or rum, beating just until blended. (Get someone to do the adding while you do the beating, and it will be much easier!) Add the vinegar. Now add enough of the milk to make a batter no thinner than an average cake batter. This might mean adding all the milk. Thick is OK, but you don’t want it too thin. Fold in reserved fruit and nuts mixture.

Spoon into pan(s) and smooth top. Bake for one hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean and the cake is firm. (It might take up to fifteen minutes longer.)

Cool completely on wire rack. Cover with foil and refrigerate or store in a cool dry place. Pan de pascua keeps for several days.

Chilean Cola de Mono
Monkey’s Tail

1 quart milk
8 tablespoons sugar (or more to taste)
4 tablespoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon grated cloves
sections of peel from 1/4 orange, white pith scraped away
1 1/2 cups freshly brewed coffee.
3/4 to 1 cup aquardiente

Aquardiente, a cane-based spirit that predates rum, is difficult to find stateside, but rum or tequila are serviceable substitutes. Paulette cautions against using vodka: “It gives a bitter taste. Don’t even try it.”

Place the milk, sugar, vanilla extract, grated nutmeg, grated cloves, and
orange peel in a two- or three-quart saucepan. Over medium heat, heat the mixture to just before to the boiling point, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat just as it’s about to boil. Stir the coffee into the hot milk. Let it cool at room temperature. (If you prefer to use instant coffee, dissolve 4 teaspoons in a cup using a little bit of the hot milk mixture, and then add it to the rest of the mixture.)

Add the liquor after the liquid has cooled. If it’s still warm, the alcohol will evaporate! You can add the liquor by stages, to adjust the strength to your taste. You might even want to add the liquor later, to suit individual tastes and so that children and other non-drinkers can enjoy it.

Remove the orange peels, strain the cola de mono and decant into bottles, using a ladle and funnel. Cover tightly and chill before serving. Keeps several days refrigerated.

Natural Collaboration: Organic Valley's George Siemon

An unconventional business, Organic Valley Family of Farms has grown into a national leader in the organic movement.

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

In Corporate Report Wisconsin, October 2003
Profile: George Siemon, Organic Valley's CEO

Needle-tart, refreshing, sweet: a delicate, complex play of juicy flavors bursts onto my tongue with startling directness, as if I’d pierced the skin of a just-picked fruit. My eyes widen. It’s organic grapefruit juice, freshly squeezed and packed into 1/2 gallon paperboard cartons, then shipped, carefully chilled, thousands of miles to Wisconsin.

Across a polished wooden conference table sits George Siemon, the CEO of Organic Valley, the fourth biggest organics brand in America. “Isn’t that stuff just incredible?” says the lanky 50-year-old, his gleaming blond hair draping to his shoulders. “We just started making juice two years ago. I drink the grapefruit juice myself.”

The juice comes from a farmer-owned cooperative of 14 members, all organic growers of citrus in Florida. That co-op is, in turn, a member of CROPP Cooperative, whose 550 farmer-members make it the largest organic farmer-owned cooperative in North America. The La Farge, Wis.-based CROPP (Cooperative Regions of Organic Producer Pools) is better known by its brand name, Organic Valley Family of Farms.

A producer of organic dairy and eggs, produce, meats, and, lately, juice, it’s also known in the natural foods world as one of the remaining independent holdouts in a growth industry in which many of the successful pioneers have been bought up by giant corporations in recent years. At Organic Valley, where each of the seven directors on the board is a farmer-member who is elected by the other farmer-members, where members own the company directly and each member gets precisely one vote, selling out is not on the agenda.

Siemon arrived at work today dressed in jeans, sandals, and a blue denim shirt embroidered above the breast pocket with the Organic Valley logo: a gambrel-roofed, red barn amid a green field of crops. He’s usually less formal, he explains, but today he’s gussied up for the CRW photo shoot.

The photos, by the way, had been delayed for a bit while Siemon pushed a dollyful of Cryovac packaging wrap through the grounds of Organic Valley’s full-to-bursting headquarters, to the cheese-packing facility somehow jammed among the offices stuffed inside the main building, an old, converted dairy. Office space spills over into a row of trailers out back.

After the photos, Siemon headed upstairs and into his office and immediately slipped out of the sandals. That’s where I am now, sipping grapefruit juice and talking with a barefooted, nature-loving, vegetable farmer who, despite having no formal business education, shepherded the rise of an association of seven Wisconsin farmers into a national company with 2003 sales expected to top $150 million.

Siemon is doubtless one of the most important figures in organics today, and not just because of his work at Organic Valley. He’s also serving the first of five years on U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Standards Board.

He’s also, arguably, one of the most important figures for the future of rural America. For decades, small farms across the nation have been going out of business, thousands and sometimes tens of thousands each year. Organics, the fastest-growing agricultural sector, is seen as a rare ray of hope for farming families. In 2002 alone, Organic Valley brought 94 farmers – 44 in Wis. – into its fold, saving many from extinction.

Siemon, who also serves on the USDA’s Small Farm Advisory Committee, uses all of his muscle to advocate for rural communities and small-scale family farming, defend the environment, and champion the ethical, humane treatment of farm animals – which generally requires practices that are possible only on small farms.

Note that the championing of small farms is an Organic Valley value, not necessarily an organic one. Half of California’s $400 million organic produce market comes from just five big farms. Washington’s Cascadian Farms, the ninth biggest organics brand in the U.S., buys the ingredients for its organic microwavable dinners, frozen veggies, jams, and more from large farms in California and abroad. Colorado-based Horizon Organic, Organic Valley’s most formidable dairy competitor, fences thousands of cows inside grassless lots. Organic to the letter of federal law, these mega-farms use no pesticides and the cows are fed grain grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fungicides. (Horizon was purchased by Dean Foods, America’s largest dairy concern, in August, 2003.) Organic Valley, on the other hand, requires its livestock farmers to provide access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, direct sunlight and natural pasture. Herds of 70-80 cows are ideal for such treatment.

Protecting rural communities and the environment is written into Organic Valley’s mission statement, and it shows in the company’s actions. Consider the site of the $4 million headquarters now under construction: a couple of hillsides away from its present Main Street address in La Farge (pop. 775), about two-thirds of the way from Madison to La Crosse. The nearest Interstate is 20 twisting miles north; the closest U.S. Highway several miles south along steep terrain.

“The expectation was that we’d move to be near a big city. Probably Chicago,” Siemon says. “We looked into it. But we decided it was right to stay in La Farge. This is where we grew up. It’s where we bank.” So instead of pulling 206 jobs out of the rural area, Organic Valley is staying put, with plans to add another 105 jobs. Local workers and, as much as possible, local contractors and locally sourced materials are being used to build the structure.

The facility will boast green goodies including cotton insulation, recycled steel siding, sheet rock made from recycled coke-ash, sustainable water-free plumbing and solar-powered parking lot lights. Windows will be specially glazed to let in a maximum of light with little glare, saving energy and providing workers with beautiful views.

“We wanted to build a green building. To provide a healthy environment for the employees, plus keep the electric bill down,” says Siemon. He firmly believes it’s good business to do good for everyone involved. “I think there’s a real positive value to creating a work environment that’s healthy and pleasant to be in. Employees react to that, don’t they? They feel, ‘Somebody cares for me.’ They’re going to work a little harder.”

He believes his approach to be the wave of the future in business: “The penny-pinching school of thought that says that all that counts is my profits, being greedy, taking advantage of your position to further yourself – it’s an attitude that’s short lived. Good business is sustainable and environmental. Really, it’s the golden rule. You can’t have a sustainable business based on another’s unsustainability.”

If this sounds like a hippie-era flower child at heart, that’s not too far off. Being a business executive was never his intention.

Growing up, Siemon yearned to get as far from his family’s office supply business as possible. “I swore I’d never be a business person,” he recalls. “I wanted to work outdoors in nature. I did outdoor bird photography when I was a kid, joined the Audubon Society. I spent my summers at farms, with family in Alabama. I was Nature Boy.”

In 1970, Siemon fled his West Palm Beach upbringing for the free-spirited atmosphere of Colorado State University. He worked his way through college as a hired hand at local farms. At first he majored in forestry, planning to become a naturalist, but he switched to animal science. “I got disillusioned with forestry,” he says. “I used to say, ‘I’m just going to count picnic tables for the government for the rest of my life.’”

After graduating in 1974, Siemon moved to Iowa with his wife, Jane, for her graduate work. Later they migrated east of the Mississippi and began farming vegetables in the rugged Kickapoo Valley region of southwest Wisconsin. (Jane continues to run the farm today.)

In 1988, they banded together with a few other farm families to form a cooperative to sell their produce. Siemon was tapped to run the business end of things. “I was the only one in the group who wasn’t raised on a farm,” he says. He was surprised to find how much useful knowledge he’d gleaned from his business family background: “You learn more sitting around the family table than you realize.”

The business gig was supposed to be temporary, Siemon says. “I kept saying, ‘I’ll get this thing going, and then I’ll quit. One more year, and then I’ll quit.” But the growth of CROPP led to an unexpected personal transformation.

“I resisted who I am today,” he says. “For the first half of this, I thought I would be quitting any time. My objective was to work my way out of a job. Then I realized that was self-centered. My whole mission in life had been to sit at home and watch the birds fly by. But it became obvious that CROPP has an important role as a farmer leader in the nation, and that I was part of that. And that I should accept that. Around 1995, we started hiring professional people. They were helpful in mentoring me and encouraging me. They said, ‘We need you.’”

“Becoming a boss was my biggest challenge,” he remembers. “You’re no longer one of the gang. You don’t know how friendly to be. How much conversation to have in the hall. You make a comment in the break room and it turns into some weird mandate.” Siemon had to accept that his former peers were no longer peers, exactly. “I had to learn how to fire friends. It’s just part of growing up. You can be mission oriented, but in order to have the luxury to serve your mission, you have to have good business.

“This place is very uncorporate, but not everyone sees that. ‘Oh, back in the old days,’ they say. Yeah, in the old days it was very tough and stressful. CROPP is changing. It’s got it’s own life. We can’t hold it back.”

That growth has not been without controversy. Over the past few years, Organic Valley squeaked by with a 1.5% profit margin, despite rocketing growth. Facing criticism from all around, not least from the bank, the co-op stubbornly refused to lower the price it paid farmers for their milk.

“Lowering the milk price would have been as easy as falling off a log,” says Siemon. “But one of our objectives is to pay farmers a good price. It’s an easy, easy path that, every time we hit a bump, oh, we’ll just lower the farmers’ pay price. That’s what happens in America. But we have a pay program the farmers expect us to deliver on. These relationships are the most important thing.”

He admits, “Quite honestly, we did take the co-op to the point of risk by growing so fast. That was the time when the mass market started to explode in organic milk. We went for that market. We grew fast, so we weren’t able to make money. The other side of it is, now we’re much bigger, serving more farmers, with a national brand well placed in the mass market. Sixty percent of our business is in the mainstream supermarkets now. We’re in chains with 900 stores. We couldn’t get in like that today. Do I regret taking that risk? No. We had to go into that world or we wouldn’t be in the position we are now: strong enough to influence the overall pricing structure.”

Ultimately, he says, he protected organic dairy’s price premium nationwide – the very thing that makes organic the hope for the future of family farming.

“My biggest dream,” says Siemon, “is that the organic marketplace will grow, that it will just explode, as individual people start taking responsibility as consumers.”
If that happens, Organic Valley farmers will be well placed, thanks to Siemon’s deft steering through the recent organic dairy boom. “We are a market leader in the industry now,” he says. “We are the number one dairy brand in natural foods markets, and number two in the mass market. We’re growing up to twice as fast as our competitor. We’re on the fast track. It’s incredibly exciting.”

George Siemon: An Inside Look
Favorite Musician:
John Trudell, known as much for his fusion of political poetry and rock and roll with Indian tribal chants and drums as for his chairmanship of the controversial American Indian Movement (AIM) through much of the 1970s.

On His Magazine Rack:
CEO
Harvard Business Review
Meat and Poultry
Rural Cooperatives
Smithsonian

Favorite Vacation:
Tent camping, horse packing or car camping in the Kickapoo Valley. “I like to hike. I like to use my feet.”

Best Way to Zone Out:
Western novels.

The Tui Na Touch: The intensity of Chinese massage at your fingertips

Story and photos by Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

Massage & Bodywork magazine, April/May 2003

View article there.

I am lying face down on a massage table. My ears are tightly covered, so that I’m deep inside a loud silence of rushing blood and muffled room tones. Explosions of pressure twang against the back of my skull and reverberate through my brain and being, over and over. I feel at first shaken apart, and then, oddly enough, powerfully relaxed — safe.

What I’m experiencing is “drumming,” one of the many moves native to tui na, or Chinese massage, the world’s earliest recorded form of massage. The way it’s accomplished is this: Cover the client’s ears tightly with your palms. Press your two middle fingers firmly against the back of the client’s head. Press your index fingers atop your middle fingers, sandwiching your middle fingers tightly. Now let your index fingers slip off the middle fingers, so they snap hard against your client’s skull. Repeat.

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) theory, this is good for tinnitus and for hyperactive conditions like anxiety, attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So says the man who is providing my demonstration in tui na, Dr. Xiping Zhou, president and founder of the East-West Healing Arts Institute, Inc., a massage school in Madison, Wis. “It stimulates the parasympathetic nerve,” Zhou says. “You can relax.” The move is contraindicated for depression: “It brings (you) down too much.”

But why all the drama? Why not just massage or press against the back of the head? “Covering the ears creates the seal, which makes the reverberations — the echo in the head,” explains Justin Polka, 28, who graduated from the East-West Healing Arts Institute in December 2002. A teacher for adults with developmental disabilities, Polka is making a career shift to therapeutic bodywork. At East-West, he gained a solid grounding both in a wide variety of Western styles of massage and in tui na, along with the attendant conceptual framework of TCM. Polka has supplemented his studies by assisting Zhou at his private acupuncture, tui na and herbal medicine practice.

Western massage is “more adapted to the pleasurable sensation of things,” says Polka’s classmate Eleni Tsioulos; the Eastern approach “is helping someone develop an active role in their own body.” But she’s glad to learn both styles. “They complement each other. Tui na can get a little intense and potent. You can rely on the Western to bring it back to that calm. But I like the idea of knowing you’ve done something, as opposed to just pleased someone,” she says. Tsioulos, 23, had experience in herbal therapy, but massage was new to her when she began her studies.

The Eastern Way

A few moments later, I’m experiencing another set of surreal sensations: the back of my neck is being kneaded and grasped with upward motions that make my whole spinal column feel like it’s floating, suspended, above the table. “In Western, they don’t do this lifting,” Zhou says. “They do the basic kneading and rubbing.”

Tui na — it literally translates to “pushing and grasping” — is central to TCM, the comprehensive approach to healthcare that includes acupuncture, Chinese herbology and meditative exercises like tai chi chuan and qigong. This same body of knowledge underlies reflexology and Asian bodywork modalities like shiatsu and Thai massage. Scholars aren’t sure exactly when Chinese medicine was first developed, but it probably dates back thousands of years before 500 BCE, the approximate date of the Neijing Suwen (a text sometimes translated as The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine), the first written compilation of what we now call TCM. One of the practices described in the Neijing Suwen is therapeutic massage, then called anmo (literally, “pushing and rubbing”). The term “tui na” came into use during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

It’s likely that most practitioners of alternative healing methods in the United States are familiar with at least the rudiments of TCM: An energy called “qi” (often spelled “chi”) animates all life. Health depends on maintaining a balance of yin and yang, the complementary energies within qi. Qi courses through the human body along energy highways known as channels or meridians. By stimulating precise points along these meridians, other parts of the body that lie along the same meridians can be influenced, even though they might seem unrelated. That’s how an acupuncturist can ease a stomachache by inserting a needle into certain points on a patient’s hand, foot or leg.

Once not well respected, these Eastern ideas — or at least the results of their practice — are increasingly becoming accepted by mainstream Western medicine. In 1998, no less an authority than the National Institutes of Health pronounced acupuncture “an effective treatment” for a variety of conditions, clinically proven to relieve aches and pains and to control nausea resulting from chemotherapy. The NIH hasn’t weighed in on TCM as a whole, but tui na is based on the same TCM principles as acupuncture.

Learning to view the human body according to the TCM paradigm was a challenge for Anne Stephenson, a licensed practical nurse of 22 years. “The Eastern way is a lot more abstract,” she says. “Parts of it were hard to comprehend, because it’s so against Western logic.” Stephenson had quit her job, finding herself drawn to “the Eastern way of things” and seeking a way to recast her life. She discovered massage after a combination of acupuncture and tui na treatments healed her chronically aching neck. “This massage had the Eastern approach and the touch therapy I wanted,” she says.

Last year, Stephenson started her own massage practice, Focused Touch, in Baraboo, Wis. She remembers a client who’d had severe rotator cuff pain for six months: a single treatment ended the problem for good. “I used the tui na arm pull,” Stephenson says. “You put their arm between your two arms, lining them up elbow to wrist. You hold on to the forearm and stretch it up in the air. The client is sitting on a chair, and you go up and down, up and down, three or four times.” Another client came to Stephenson with a foot condition. “She used to wear orthotics. Now she can walk barefoot.”

While Swedish-based Western massage forms are founded on an understanding of musculature, tui na follows from an understanding of the energy meridians. As a result, some of the key body areas in tui na are left more or less untouched in Western massage. For instance, TCM identifies dozens of individual points on the head, each with its own potential for healing. But in Western massage — as in Western medicine — these points don’t have any particular importance.

A Systematic, Energetic Approach

Now Zhou uses his knuckle to press a point at the center of the top of my head, exerting steady pressure for about a minute. He identifies the spot as GV 20, the number 20 point on the governor meridian. GV 20 is also known as the “hundred energies meeting point,” a point that’s “very important to regulate the body’s energy flow,” he says. But in the Western view, “this is really nothing going to any muscle here. Nothing significant.”
Then he climbs right up onto the massage table and grasps the parallel steel bars of a 6-foot-high frame around it. The frame is there specifically for the safe practice of walking massage: chai qiao.

The backs of my thighs burn sharply as Zhou treads on them. The pressure is so deep I feel it in my very veins. (Because it is so intense, chai qiao is not for children or the very elderly, or in general anyone in a frail condition.) I try to relax into the experience and not fight against it, remembering that Chinese massage is not about making the client feel good at the moment of treatment; it’s the long-term results that matter. Nevertheless, I’m glad to discover that it feels pretty good when Zhou’s feet walk carefully along the small of my back — the power of an entire body directed into the toes, heels and soles moving and alive against my back, delivering more force more deeply than hands ever could. “This is very good for athletes,” Zhou explains, “because of their big muscles. You use the hand, you won’t go too deep sometimes.”

Next, one foot, wedged in my armpit, pulls in the opposite direction from the foot on the back of my wrist. It’s not what I’d call restful, but for my ever-tense shoulders and upper back, somehow it feels marvelous. I hear, “Ow!” It comes from me.

Within the vast scope of TCM, tui na is a extensive, complex system in its own right. Tui na techniques include pushing, dragging, “nipping,” strong pinching, chopping, rubbing, and kneading, to name just a few. There’s vigorous rolling using the knuckles and the back of the hand, “scrubbing” with the pinky finger side of the hand, applying pressure with the elbows, grasping at the back and spine with splayed fingers and interlocked thumbs, and brisk tapping with the cupped hands or edges of the palms. Deciding when to use any of these moves depends on a variety of factors. A tui na practitioner well versed in TCM theory can address the complete range of human pathology.

“What it adds for bodyworkers is a systematic, energetic approach. The use of points and meridians gives them a consistent paradigm,” Bill Helm says. He’s a longtime instructor of tui na, and one of its first practitioners in the United States. “There are a lot of adaptive systems using an energetic approach, but they’re not systematic, in the sense that they’re highly intuitive. They develop a lot of things on their own. With tui na, you get points and channels you can count on. They’ve been working for people for thousands of years.”

For Western bodyworkers schooled in anatomy and musculature, TCM “just adds another dimension,” he says. “And it doesn’t contradict anything they’ve learned before.” Helm is dean of allied studies at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine and director of the Taoist Sanctuary, both in San Diego.

Erica Williams is a Western-massage-trained bodyworker who added tui na know-how to her personal toolkit after 10 years of practicing massage therapy at spas in San Francisco, Costa Rica, Mexico and her home town of Milwaukee. In Chinese massage, she discovered a whole new dimension to bodywork. “The techniques are very different from Western massage,” Williams explains. “You’re able to get into different ways to treat the problem area. The movements and techniques are really effective for certain problems. Carpal tunnel’s a really good one. I can apply heat friction by rolling with my forearm against their forearm, wrist, hand and thumb pad.”

Besides providing new ways to help her clients, Williams says tui na has been a boon to her own body. “My hands were getting burned out,” she says. Now, instead of using “the typical Swedish moves — thumb circles, kneading and using my fingers, I’ll use rolling.” A favorite move for a client’s leg now is “rolling my forearm and wrist. With tui na, I can use my whole arm. The movements are more rapid and can wake the muscles up. Runners love it!”

Williams says she’s looking forward to learning more tui na techniques. “I find it interesting and it works. That’s all I can say — it really works.”

The Power of Integration

Bill Helm had been practicing tui na for 10 years when he first visited China in 1986. He was surprised to find there a matter-of-fact acceptance of massage as an indispensable healing tool with comprehensive applications. “It was a real eye-opener,” he says. “It had the same status as acupuncture and herbs. I thought, 'Oh, this is its proper place.’ “

The same integrative approach is taken towards combining Western medicine and TCM in China, where it’s standard for a mix of TCM, TCM-and-Western and Western doctors to practice in concert. The 43-year-old Zhou is a combination doctor; his dual medical degree from Heilongjiang Medical University of Traditional Chinese Medicine fully licenses him (in China) to practice both Western medicine and TCM.

David Crain, a massage therapist who practices what he likes to call “a bizarre combination of Eastern and Western massage styles” at the Wellhouse Center in Windsor, Wis., visited Heilongjiang’s hospitals on a three-week internship offered by Zhou. “Seeing how it works there was fabulous,” Crain recalls. “The Eastern and Western doctors presented such a united medical front. The amount of time each doctor would spend with each patient was incredible. The treatments were more grounded, more thorough.” While there, Crain received tui na treatment for a pinched nerve in his arm that had bothered him for years. “I hurt my arm working in a UPS warehouse,” he explains. Chiropractic treatments had helped, but after tui na treatments, the years of chronic pain were finally resolved for good. “It was a very different style of manipulation,” he remembers. “Definitely more painful than the chiropractic. Tui na is not necessarily the most comfortable thing.”

“Tui na offers an alternative to acupuncture — a therapy for aches and pains without any needles,” Zhou says.
And there are still plenty of people who are scared of TCM — the needles, the alienness of it all, David Milbradt says. Milbradt operates a private acupuncture and herbal medicine practice in Madison and he is a member of the faculty at East-West, where he teaches a course in the fundamentals of Oriental medicine. Some people might never dream of visiting a doctor of Chinese medicine, he says, but they just might visit a massage therapist to relieve some of their pain or to restore their feeling of well-being. If that massage therapist is armed with tui na, so much the better. “For some people, massage is more familiar,” he explains. “It’s a step they can imagine. Oriental massage opens up the chance to work with more therapeutic possibilities than relaxation.” Another plus: massage involves “less liability” than acupuncture. It also takes less time and money to get an education and become licensed, and the practice itself is far less expensive to set up.

Milbradt speaks enthusiastically of tui na’s potency. “Can you do as much with massage as with acupuncture? I think you can come fairly close,” he says. “That’s a good goal, to come as close as you can. But, will clients come to a massage therapist for the same range of diseases for which they’ll turn to an acupuncturist? Obviously not.”

Milbradt tells me that some of East-West’s latest crop of students, inspired by the TCM theory they’ve learned here, have applied to acupuncture school. But for most, their East-West education provided exactly what they were looking for: a way to synthesize Eastern and Western approaches into their practice of massage.

Zhou is careful not to overstate the level of TCM education his school — or any tui na curriculum in the United States today — offers. A 751-hour program like East-West’s can’t impart as much theory as a full-time TCM institution in China that includes ongoing tui na instruction as part of its five-year program. The knowledge East-West gives its students is “more basic, like a Chinese medicine technician’s skill,” he explains.

Still, East-West is one of the institutions that can qualify students to apply for certification as an Asian bodywork therapist with the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM). The NCCAOM is the organization that grants national certification in acupuncture and Chinese herbology; their new Diplomate in Asian Bodywork Therapy was added in 2002.

The Pacific College of Oriental Medicine is another school whose tui na grads qualify to take the exam that allows them to place the letters “Dipl. A.B.T. (NCCAOM)” after their names. Both Zhou and Helm are certified instructors with the American Organization of Bodywork Therapies of Asia (AOBTA), and both offer students the tools for a lifetime of tui na practice. But both also welcome massage novices and seasoned professionals who simply want to add some tui na to their practice — a little or a lot.

This mix-and-match approach doesn’t sit well with everyone. Barbra Esher, the Baltimore-based director of education for the AOBTA, says, “You really do a disservice to this 8,000-year-old tradition if you just take a couple of the elements. There’s a big difference between adding the tweaks and twaddles to your practice and learning a whole set of treatment principles.” Esher writes about Asian bodywork as a columnist for Massage Today. With tui na, she says, “You’re not working on bones and muscles. You’re working on 12 meridians, disbursing heat, or tonifying yang, or expelling a pathogenic factor, just to give some examples.”

How does tui na fit in with the larger picture of bodywork in America today? “The way that it fits in is that people go and study the whole system,” she says.

Zhou disagrees. “It’s true, to become a good practitioner of TCM, you must learn it all — the assessment, the culture, the theory, the philosophy. But if a Western massage therapist wants to just use some techniques, that’s good, too. They can just take some courses. It’s an additional asset.”

He defends even the notion of putting isolated “tweaks and twaddles” to work. “This Chinese technique of skin rolling,” he says, demonstrating with a broad, pinching motion, “it was developed 700 years ago for pediatric massage. It was introduced in America not long ago. Western therapists are already using it all over. It’s very popular.”

“I’ve been teaching for more than 20 years,” Helm says. “I’m dealing with the reality of how it’s used. You have some people who want to develop a TCM approach, closer to the acupuncture model. And a lot of students who are not interested in being primarily tui na. They’re interested in specific therapeutic applications. A person is having problems with their shoulder, so you should do this. Swedish massage doesn’t address that specifically. They break into tui na for 15 minutes, resolve the shoulder problem, and then go back to the Swedish massage.

“They’re not looking to balance the person’s energies. But the person does benefit. That’s the nature of modern bodywork. It’s eclectic.”

In response to Esher’s criticism of tui na theory and practice out of context, Helm invokes Taoist philosophy: “In a sense it’s a disservice, but at the same time, as part of the Taoist tradition, it’s a big change. What’s important is to be harmonious in a situation.”

In the past few years, Helm has seen tui na enrollment swell. “As bodywork in general matures more in this country, tui na practice and teaching will expand,” Helm predicts.

“What I’m seeing more and more of is students coming for the tui na, not just the acupuncture. More people are becoming aware of the richness and the depth of it,” he says. On the part of clients, “more people think of getting tui na, not so much for pampering, but for healing. If they’re looking for healing, they go for Asian massage, with heavier pressure and more specific focus.”

In recognizing the range and power of the ancient science of tui na, Americans are beginning to experience what’s been known in China for millennia: massage can be seriously therapeutic, not simply relaxing.

Vesna Vuynovich Kovach is a freelance writer in Madison, Wis., whose passion for natural living leads her to write on holistic health, sustainable agriculture, microbrewery beers, home cooking and other things that make life pleasant to live.

To learn more about the East-West Healing Arts Institute, visit www.acupressureschool.com or call 608/236-9000. You can visit the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine website at www.pacificcollege.edu or phone 619/574-6909. The Taoist Sanctuary’s website is www.taoistsanctuary.org; phone, 619-692-1155. The American Organization of Bodywork Therapies of Asia is on the Web at www.aobta.org; phone, 856/782-1616. Recent books about tui na include Chinese Tui Na Massage: The Essential Guide to Treating Injuries, Improving Health & Balancing Qi by Xu Xiangcai, Hu Ximing, (YMAA Publications, 2002) and The Handbook of Chinese Massage: Tui Na Techniques to Awaken Body and Mind by Maria Mercati (Healing Arts Press, 1997).