Eating and drinking has a long history in China. Since ancient times, there has been a saying that "medicine and food are homologous". As early as ancient times, when people were looking for food, they found that some foods had the function of treating diseases. The earliest pharmaceutical monograph in China, Shennong Materia Medica Classic, recorded many medicinal and edible varieties such as Coicis Semen, Jujube, Sesame, Grape, Yam, Walnut, Lily and Lotus Seed, and expounded their functions. The earliest medical work Huangdi Neijing has a diet prescription. For example, cuttlefish bone Pill uses sparrow eggs, abalone, madder and cuttlefish bone to treat blood deficiency. Zhang Zhongjing, a great doctor in the Han Dynasty, attached great importance to the application of diet and created many diet recipes, such as Danggui Ginger Mutton Soup, which has a remarkable effect on postpartum weakness and has been widely used so far. The Tang Dynasty was the formative period of dietotherapy in China. During this period, the first monograph of dietotherapy in China was published, which recorded the efficacy and indications of 227 kinds of medicated diets. Sun, a famous medical scientist, also listed an article on "food therapy" in his medical book "Thousand Daughters", emphasizing that "a husband is a doctor, he should know the source of the disease, know what disease he has committed, treat with food, and order medicine if the diet can't be cured", pointing out that "food can drive away evil, calm the viscera, refresh the mind, and enrich blood and gas", and created tuckahoe crisp and almond crisp. After that, physicians and health experts in past dynasties gradually deepened their research on diet, which made China's diet research constantly improve and develop.
With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and awareness of disease prevention, China's diet has received extensive attention from domestic and foreign medicine, nutrition and the general public. However, there is still a lack of reference books on the arrangement, research, development and application of catering, from theoretical guidance to practical and reasonable application. In order to make the diet more standardized and systematic, and at the same time meet people's needs for disease prevention and health care, the Ninth Five-Year Plan (Beijing) Health Science and Technology Co., Ltd. has compiled this comprehensive diet textbook according to actual needs, including the basic theory of traditional Chinese medicine, diet foundation, commonly used drugs and food and diet spectrum, with a total of 250,000 words, in order to guide workers engaged in diet research and application development.