Food-history researcher Zhang Sirui traces milk’s path to globalisation: once a “barbaric drink” to the ancient Greeks, an everyday beverage in China for barely more than a century, its history interwoven with science, politics and global trade.
A 2023 study by Feng Xiaojun and team at China Agricultural University in a major dairy-farming county in Shandong found family dairy farms surpass large-scale farms on income, import resilience, environment and dairy cow welfare. Smallholder exclusion by dairy processors stems from unequal bargaining power; policy and organisation must combine.
The melamine incident was not the fault of small dairy farmers, nor are large pastures necessarily safer at the production, distribution, and processing stages. With residents’ protein intake already adequate, the nutritional gap between the two types of milk is negligible.
Where farming guarantees a loss and processing a profit, Wuwei’s returned young farmer Yin Fahua makes noodles from purchased gravel-covered Hongguangtou wheat — only to hold the line on pesticide-free ecological farming, and to hold on to that fragrant handful of fried chickpeas along his childhood field edges.
In far-flung Beijing, Uncle Li bought two bunches of winter-keeping leeks at the open-air market twenty-odd years ago. Selecting the best, crossing varieties, treasuring storm survivors—he saves seed; the white stems stretch and thicken. Buyers agree: no one round here growing leeks comes close to old Li.
From Qiandongnan to Baoding, from Thailand to the Philippines, seed-saving farmers and seed workers guard old varieties amid the standardised expansion of hybrid seed, questioning who has the right to decide what we grow and what we eat.
Lamb prices have slumped for years and imported frozen meat has flooded the market, trapping generations of Qinghai Lake herders in revolving debt: some sold their yaks at a pittance to deliver food in town; others carry 200,000-yuan loans, hoping each year for sheep prices to rebound.
Zha Shiyire, a Huayao Yi, grew up in a mountain village in Shiping County, Yunnan. Her mother whistled from the bund, calling the wind; the family bent, planting tobacco, reaping rice, shredding radish strips. Farm work is never finished — she never loved it, nor could she loathe it.
From Beijing to Yunnan, the practice of more than a dozen ecological farms across the country shows that weeds are not enemies to be conquered but partners in mending soil and building ecology; how weeds are managed reveals the fundamental difference in how farmers relate to nature.
Solvent extraction dissolves oil with n-hexane, then subjects it to two rounds of high-temperature decolourisation and deodorisation; solvent residues, trans fat and excess omega-6 are hard to avoid. Nuts, home-pressed oil and low-temperature cooking offer alternatives.