Food regulation, foodborne risks, processing, additives, and related safety issues.
An Anhui family travelled far into the Hunan countryside to open a mooncake factory. The child grew up beside the conveyor belt through summer holidays, until the factory shut, the fields all became sheds, and the bicycle on the river embankment rode ever further away.
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
Twenty-four years after its ban, “lean-meat powder” is still detectable in pork, and residues of hormones such as trenbolone and metandienone are almost absent from food safety spot-check lists—behind athletes’ positive doping tests lie hidden risks of everyday hormone ingestion for ordinary people.
Tanker trucks loaded edible soybean oil without cleaning; even public attention can hardly break industry collusion. New mothers, facing pesticide-treated fruit and baby formula ingredient lists, feel even more at a loss. Keeping food sources within a knowable, controllable range has become the most realistic response.
In Yulin, Chengdu, Xia Lili has set up a community small dining table with traceable, farm-direct ingredients, giving a group long reliant on takeaway a reason to pick up their rice bowls again. Some have regained their appetite; others, their motivation to get up on time.
A Nature Communications serum study of 5,696 people across 15 provinces found 74 environmental hazardous chemicals at high detection rates, closely linked to 12 chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity; China’s blood residue levels of organochlorine pesticides and PFASs are significantly higher than in other countries.
Li Ruijun, a wild-mushroom researcher, was poisoned by overeating broom blossoms last year. Even the termite mushroom, long thought to grow only on termite nests, has been trialled for cultivation — four people in ecology and natural history chat about the safety, authenticity and nature education of foraged food.
The marketing rhetoric of premium supermarkets, the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavour wheel, legislation shaped by lobbying from large agribusinesses—quality is no natural concept, and consumers and smallholder farmers remain ever on the margins of this chain of power.
From ready-to-heat dumplings to central kitchen ingredients, pre-made dishes have permeated takeaways, school meals and New Year’s Eve dinners. Five contributors — including an anthropologist, a domestic worker and a sustainability practitioner — shared their views on identification, plastic packaging and the impact on Chinese chefs.
Sun Shan runs an ecological farm and fermentation kitchen in Ottawa. Eight years of daily vegetable-growing and sauerkraut-making embody Sandor Katz’s vision in The Art of Fermentation: fermentation is not just food preservation, but a way to rebuild connections with microorganisms, the land and the community.
