Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
Musang King and Black Thorn oversupply triggered this year’s Malaysian “durian tsunami”. Balik Pulau’s Kampung old-tree smallholders are caught in it: tree-ripened fruit has an extremely short shelf life, sold cheap or discarded first – and many farmers have already felled their old trees, switching to grafted premium cultivars.
A single banquet table holds the bustle of rural hospitality and thirty years of shifting ties and conventions. From a baby’s full-moon celebration to a school-admission banquet, from the big village pots to the Dragon and Phoenix Hall, Foodthink invites you to share your own banquet story.
Foodthink invited readers to share old kitchen items they refuse to discard: a cast-iron pan used for decades, an enamel mug kept 33 years since military training, an ox-bone dumpling-filling spoon passed down three generations. Their worn marks carry the memories no family will let go.
On a xu day in Lihu Yao Ethnic Township, I bought hemp seeds, sour meat and stuffed tofu with the White Pants Yao, then watched pao sha winding and golden silk silkworms spinning at the wall-less Ecomuseum — one market linking farming, weaving and the whole valley’s daily life.
From Wuxi’s Yan Du Xian to Anji’s dried shoots and Peach Blossom dried bamboo shoots in Hunan’s groves, one season’s fresh bamboo shoots thread through generations’ hearths across Jiangnan and the southwest, and through vanishing rural flavours — the fire-baked bamboo shoot cake, Anji bamboo shoot and peanut snacks.
A graduate of the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo, recalls the days spent with Petrini in Bra, and the voices in the Slow Food movement yet to be heard.
In 1946, Shen Dongyan in Malaysia sent a qiaopi simply to have his mother buy a braised goose for ancestral rites. In the Chaoshan region, braised goose is the offering of the highest grade on the offering table; this reverence has continued from the Nanyang to today.
Author of The Vanishing Bees, Professor Lü Chensheng of Southwest University, begins with Colony Collapse Disorder at a Foodthink talk, discussing the ecological and health risks of pesticides entering the food chain from seeds, and seed companies’ influence on agricultural policy. 31 May afternoon, Beijing + online.
In 1922, eight tourists died from Clostridium botulinum in duck pâté at Loch Maree, Scotland, and panic spread. Microbiology and market forces converged: corporate advertising, hygiene certification and the Pure Food and Drug Act combined to push home fermentation, step by step, out of the kitchen.
In 1995, my nan set up this sold-by-weight condiment stall at Yijing Market in Wuzhou. Since mum took over, she remembers each regular’s usual soy-sauce brand — and from dawn opening to late-night spice repacking, one busy stretch lasts twelve hours.
