Guanzhong’s old-variety muskmelon Baituwa, passed down for decades by farmers saving their own seed, has now retreated from city shelves under the pressure of large-scale cultivation and e-commerce sales, glimpsed only occasionally at rural markets.
The Udon Thani sugar mill was shut for over-receiving burnt sugarcane, stranding nearly 2,000 lorries and some 50,000 tonnes facing rot. Fresh-cut harvesting costs triple that of burning; fines and subsidies cannot bridge the gap — smallholders have no way out between the burn ban and survival.
China’s registered dietitian system has no ethical guidelines on commercial endorsements, so taking ads easily becomes a purely financial choice. US Registered Dietitian (RD) Zheng Luyue interviewed peers; the traffic-integrity trade-off varies individually. Consumers can spot pseudo-science communication by identifying conflicts of interest and questioning data sources.
Muyunpo was founded in 2017 by the non-profit Shuguang in Xiaojin County, Sichuan’s Jiarong Tibetan region. Villagers’ groups set their own foraging and cultivation standards, with sales surpluses returned to the community at year-end—replacing the traditional purchasing system of price-suppressing traders and farmers at the market’s mercy.
The National Health Commission has launched a three-year “Weight Management Year” initiative, yet modern obesity is a systemic issue shaped by food industry, takeaway and pseudo-health foods. Foodthink charts a scientific path from dietary structure through processed-food traps to natural dietary principles, beyond ‘dieting equals weight loss’ mindset.
A cup of Americano squeezed to six yuan, a meat pancake to ten — traffic has become the platform’s weapon to force shops into loss-making price concessions. Pinhaofan’s cheapness is no technological innovation, but a cost borne jointly by shop owners and riders.
In 2023, The Examination and The Washington Post found that several US Registered Dietitians took money from beverage and sugar industry associations to endorse products while hiding sponsorship — and that the American Beverage Association is itself a principal sponsor of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND).
Research Fellow Wang Xiaoyi (Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) unpacks the contradiction between pasture-fattened yaks that “can’t fetch a fair price” and local meat that herders “can’t afford”. After marketisation “disembedded” beef and mutton from pastoral life, he asks how to “re-embed” them into the community.
Renting an Airbnb in Sydney to ring in the New Year, a family found avian influenza pushing eggs to nearly four yuan each, Chinese noodles at eighty a bowl, and coffee nearly doubled. Only back in China did she realise how precious that home-cooked bowl was.
In a small ranching town in Texas, Zhang Yiqing buys eggs directly from free-range backyard hens and small organic farmers, sidestepping supermarket purchase limits and price hikes. She believes decentralised local food systems are the real solution to the egg shortages intensive farming keeps causing.