Food regulation, foodborne risks, processing, additives, and related safety issues.
Foodthink Says In January this year, a Beijing resident ordered fresh lilies via Hema, but mistakenly received toxic narcissus bulbs instead, leading to the hospitalisation of their 71-year-old mother and 12-year-old son after they consumed them. Addressing the mix-up, Hema explained that during the picking process, a packer had mistakenly…
In 1972, British scientist John Yudkin published a book titled Pure, White and Deadly. The protagonist of that book was sugar—pure, white sugar. The protagonist of this short piece is sugar too, but the sweet kind. Here, ‘sugar’ refers to sugar itself, sweets, and added sugars in food. On an…
A note to all departments: Foodthink’s “Jishi Takeover 3.0” and Annual Gathering Special Project is now officially underway! On Saturday 7 February, from 10:00 to 22:00, we will take over Jishi, the community outlet for the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market at Sanyuanqiao. This is not only the source of ingredients…
Looking back at 2025, it opened as a year of loss, as we said goodbye to my mother. Returning to the “Valley of the Wicked”, I welcomed a succession of harvests. From spring onwards, I gathered rapeseed—twenty to twenty-five kilos—yielding more oil than I could possibly use in a year.…
“‘A glass of milk a day strengthens the Chinese people’ – an advertising slogan most of you will recognise instantly.” In fact, the majority of Chinese people are lactose intolerant, and drinking milk can trigger diarrhoea, bloating and other digestive discomforts. Yet on today’s dining table, milk has become an…
Foodthink Says Securing safe and nutritious milk is a primary concern for many consumers. At the start of the 21st century, China’s raw milk was predominantly produced by small family farms; today, it comes mainly from large-scale operations housing over 1,000 cows. Over the past decade, farms with herds of…
Let’s begin with a quick test: what happened on 2 July 2024? Without reaching for your phone, take a moment to recall. I guarantee that the vast majority will have forgotten. When I searched online on this date in 2025, I found not a single reference to the tanker truck…
As long as we draw breath, we cannot get by without the everyday essentials of firewood, rice, oil, and salt. Across cultures, whether East or West, the culinary terms ‘rice’, ‘flour’, and ‘oil’ are ancient words, carrying well over a millennium of history. Since humanity entered the agricultural era, their…
Foodthink’s Take Since early June, a video titled “From a City Besieged by Waste to a Shortage of Trash to Burn: China’s Speed Leaves the West Stunned” has spread rapidly online. The prospect of shovelling unsightly waste into an incinerator to burn it all away, then harnessing the released energy…
Two years ago, I moved to a financial news outlet to cover agriculture full-time. I had hoped it would bring me closer to the land and to food itself, forging a fresh connection between journalism and the realities of daily life. Unlike food writers who dwell on flavour, I reported…
