Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
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…
Over the past few years, work commitments have meant I always leave Beijing just as the crabapples are about to bloom, and return by the time the poplar catkins have finished drifting. Though I miss Beijing’s spring, I gain Shangri-La’s in return. Nestled at the junction of Yunnan, Sichuan and…
Foodthink Says This marks the sixth instalment of story submissions for Foodthink’s “Eat Something Good” series, themed around “wet markets”. What has surprised us is that, in an age of relentless acceleration, we continue to receive a wealth of personal accounts from readers about these spaces. Set against earlier themes…
I. Assembling the Culture Room Eight years ago, I created a piece centred on naturally fermented yoghurt, drying yoghurt starter cultures onto fabric. I was never particularly keen on drinking yoghurt; back then, I mainly made it because I saw natural fermentation as a potential medium for artistic expression. Consequently,…
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…
A Word from Foodthink Today marks the first day of the National Day holiday. I wonder if you’ve already hit the road? Recently, Foodthink’s “Eat Well” initiative invited readers to share their home fermentation methods and experiences. We’ve summarised three secret tips and identified one category that is particularly prone…
Would you spend tens of yuan in a restaurant on a portion of frozen broccoli that might well be older than your child? — We’ve recently learned that this seemingly absurd scenario might actually be the case. Pre-prepared meals are quietly taking over our dining tables. From restaurants to takeaways,…
