Analysis of agricultural product prices, supply chains, corporate behavior, and industry trends.
Oyster sauce, crisps and salad dressings all hide sugar – eighty per cent of supermarket shelves can’t do without it. Excess fructose converts to fat in the liver, driving the fatty liver → diabetes → heart disease chain; children are steeped in sugar from an early age.
Jiang Ke, who served seven months as a Shift Manager at McDonald’s, discovered that the precise order-fulfilment system is both advanced and fragile—behind the beeps and countdowns lies the staff’s real experience of “human-machine unity” in a cramped kitchen.
Eight Foodthink colleagues worked a 12-hour non-stop shift at Jishi—from veg identification and stock intake to live-stream shopping to communal dish-washing after the lamb soup screening—and encountered the unseen labour and carbon behind cold-chain energy consumption and an annual lease.
Forty years after dual contracting of grassland and livestock, J village in Qinghe County still has only 92 grassland certificates while pastoral households exceed 200. They sow lucerne on their hay meadows, pay irrigation charges, and buy fodder from farming areas at twice their own harvest before winter.
Anonymous readers from southwest, northwest, and central China described farmland abandonment due to water shortage after high-standard farmland conversion, raw subsoil exposed by construction destroying soil fertility, and outsider large-scale operators suspected of leasing land to extract subsidies. Contractors also reported plunging profits and overly stringent oversight.
Last century, the Sugar Association funded Harvard scholars to blame heart disease on fat; Ancel Keys’s Seven Countries Study cemented this with cherry-picked data. The first Dietary Guidelines for Americans ushered in half a century of low-fat wrong turns — only the 2026 edition finally rejects added sugars entirely.
Forty thousand delivery riders faced 700,000 active peers; the platforms raised per-order prices and simply defused the strike. Lacking employment contracts and strike protections, riders continue to take risks in a cycle of ever-shrinking algorithmic delivery deadlines.
Meishan farmer Zhao Lishun watched rice paddies transferred to outside large-scale lessees go mouldy and be left unharvested. Across villages in Sichuan, Guizhou and Henan, high-standard conversion has stripped away topsoil, water-conservancy facilities are empty shells, and the “large-field” model is pulling villagers further from their land.
Gail Borden’s canned condensed milk, Henri Nestlé’s infant milk powder and the transnational competition of the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company turned perishable fresh milk into an ocean-crossing industrial commodity in the nineteenth century.
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.
