Steep

What it is

Steep is a desktop reference tool for Traditional Chinese Medicine food therapy. It gives licensed acupuncturists and TCM practitioners a fast, searchable database of foods organized by their therapeutic properties — thermal nature, flavor profile, organ meridian affinities, and Five Element associations.

Why it exists

TCM food therapy knowledge lives in textbooks, photocopied handouts, and the back of practitioners’ brains. There’s no modern, searchable reference tool that understands the domain. Steep fills that gap with a purpose-built interface that speaks the language of the practice.

What makes it different

Five Element color system. Foods are visually organized by their elemental associations. Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water — each with its own color language that practitioners already think in.

Bidirectional search. Look up a food to see its properties, or search by property to find matching foods. “What foods are warming and enter the Kidney meridian?” is a first-class query.

Thermal filtering. Sort and filter by hot, warm, neutral, cool, cold. Because sometimes you need cooling foods and you need them now.

Offline-first. The entire database ships with the app. No internet required to look up whether mung beans are cooling (they are).

The name

Steeping is the process of extracting medicine from herbs in hot water — the oldest form of food therapy. It’s also what you do with tea, which is basically TCM in a cup.