Coke’s profit code is hidden in public water supply, government-subsidised sugar and cheap caffeine. Bart J. Elmore’s The Coca-Cola Empire writes this “scavenger”-style plunder—and the plastic and obesity bills it foists off—into history.
At Yulin’s Longquan Green Vegetable Shop, several owners bound in an egalitarian partnership tend local ecological produce and the daily weigh-and-close routine. Professor Xu Leiqing’s Research Group 408 at Tongji University finds such a community space — most accessible, most frequently visited — is itself a therapeutic setting.
Foodthink farmer-foodie Kouzi cooks a pot of over a dozen kinds of beans and grains as porridge: soak 48 hours to encourage sprouting and degrade phytic acid, pre-cook beans and grains in stages to remove purines, freeze a day to form resistant starch—one bowl, nutrition and delight.
Six months on, cook Xia Lili’s community kitchen in Yulin, Chengdu has knit her meal companions, pot by pot. A burst pipe led a neighbour to take them all in; a new arrival wrote their song. This all-female crew’s table is now a pillar in each life.
The eating disorders art exhibition at Gallery No. 600, Shanghai Mental Health Centre, unites patient-created and professional works. Curator Zhang Qinwen, a six-year survivor, founded the ED Healer mutual-support community, using science communication and exhibitions to build public awareness of this illness.
On the eve of the Paris Olympics, more than 100,000 people signed a petition calling on the International Olympic Committee to terminate its Coca-Cola sponsorship contract. The reasoning mirrors that which once banished tobacco from sport: sugary drinks are using sport to sportswash their health and environmental harms.
Stir-frying spans only a few centuries; iron woks and refined oil are both recent arrivals. The real excess is high-temperature refined oil, not natural fats in nuts and the like. Skipping stir-frying is much like barefoot running: a way of living that returns to our evolutionary instincts.
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.
In Japanese, “soba” and “beside me” are homophones — housewarming noodles for neighbours, toshikoshi soba on Ōmisoka, enduring customs. In Nagano, the heart of soba country, from Jōmon-era famine porridge to Edo peddlers’ cries, this bowl’s journey hides in the everyday.
Xia Lili cooks for her meal companions in Yulin, Chengdu – a bowl of pa pa cai boiled in plain water, no oil, no salt, ten grains cooked into one pot of rice – bringing farmer friends, bodies and the land back to the same table.