Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
In 2006, on the banks of the Jinsha River, six ethnicities in Chezhu village celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival together. Their mooncakes had no filling; the wheat, rapeseed oil, eggs and maltose were all homegrown—”Everything but the iron pot is homegrown.”
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.
Jinzi grows heirloom yellow garden peas using biodynamic farming on mountains above 3,000 metres in Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture. Shipping lasts only about two weeks a year; this year, three jin of pods finally reached the dining buddies’ table.
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.
At Pengcheng Natural Farm in Yinlin Village, Conghua—pruning lychee branches, leaving grass to nourish the soil, reduced tillage and less fertilising—these everyday labours of Natural Farming were four gifts of letting go, simplicity, relaxation and acceptance from an ecological agriculture internship.
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.
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.
At Meet Farm in Meishan, Chen Ying replaces pesticides and chemical fertilisers with rice-duck pest control and kitchen-waste composting. Across forty mu, she grows and raises everything herself – the only food that needs to be bought in is salt.
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.
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.
