Nutrition structures, dietary health trends, and the relationship between bodies and food.
Each year, 315 sees a concentrated public focus on food safety. Yet, the impact of “digital pickled mustard greens” – this form of virtual sustenance – on dietary wellbeing has yet to command adequate attention. Short videos, television dramas, variety shows, podcasts… content collectively dubbed “digital pickled mustard greens” has…
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…
7 January 2026. The first major headline for food enthusiasts in the new year: the US has released its updated Dietary Guidelines. The announcement sparked widespread debate, with opinions varying widely. The most noticeable changes are clear at a glance. The comments beneath the post are equally fascinating: “Surely they…
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 says *Eating the World: Industrial Britain, Food Systems and World Ecology* was published in 2020 by Chris Ott, a historian at Ohio State University. The book examines the shift in the British diet since 1750 alongside industrialisation: a transition from locally sourced plant-based proteins to the mass consumption of…
From the media dispute between JD.com and Meituan over delivery riders’ social insurance in April, to the new regulations mandating compulsory contributions from 1 September, the working conditions of these riders have increasingly drawn public attention. Yet for many of them, social insurance remains a distant concept, overshadowed by the…
