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.
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.
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.
The bran sifted out during flour milling is toasted until fragrant, ground fine, and packaged as “wheat germ flour” to be sold back at a premium. Polished rice and refined flour, having undergone excessive extraction and addition, have become ultra-processed food.
Videos of Zhejiang and Shanghai incineration plants “competing for waste” across provinces and municipalities went viral. But waste management advocates point out that overcapacity is the reality – legally mandated dioxin data, tested only once a year, is far from “real-time monitoring”.
A former agriculture reporter covered feed market prices and live hog shipments for two and a half years – yet stories mostly came from listed companies’ earnings, and food was always just figures. Renting a plot, chasing abscessed pork: neither closed the gap between commercial framing and the field.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., riding the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, has axed 3,500 FDA staff, slashed its budget by $400 million and suspended the food-testing sampling programme — hitting an agency already short-staffed and embroiled in several recent fatal food safety incidents.
At a slaughterhouse in eastern Sichuan, over ¥100 million in investment, daily beef sales mean pre-dawn complaint barrages, lost orders over scarce back sirloin, and blood stench that won’t wash off — nineteen years of education shattered by the butchers’ flexibility.
Sourdough, olive oil and flaked sea salt have become the hottest items on UK supermarket shelves, behind which lies the anti-ultra-processed food movement sparked by the #UPF hashtag on TikTok. But Waitrose caters primarily to middle-class consumers, and “eating clean” is being packaged as a new consumption hierarchy.
Ten-fen school-gate ice lollies, Ah Ma’s pig’s-trotter rings from the market, and mother-steamed táo guǒ – Zhang Fulan’s most solid childhood flavours in 1990s Jieyang, Chaoshan; after snack chains and food delivery reshaped a generation’s bodies, she returned to the stove to relearn those guǒ pǐn with her mother.