Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
On 4 July, US Independence Day, Trump signed the “Make America Beautiful Act”, announcing that his most critical agenda for his second presidential term had passed Congress. This sweeping tax-cut and spending bill touches on every facet of US social policy. While Trump claims the “Make America Beautiful Act” will…
Many view craft beer as a niche culture centred on individuality and distinctive taste. Yet long before the arrival of industrial lagers with their monotonous, watery profiles, brewing traditions and flavour profiles were inherently diverse. Beyond the flattening of taste, industrial beer has also stripped fermented foods of their natural…
“Complaints and mishaps pile up every early morning. Yet I choose to switch off my phone and bury myself in sleep: they are never serious enough to drive clients away or push the slaughterhouse into bankruptcy. They simply keep turning up at their usual time each day, keeping our routines…
That loaf of bread has sold out again. This weekend, as usual, I headed to the supermarket to stock up on next week’s “survival rations”. I made my way to the bakery aisle looking for Jason’s Sourdough, only to find the shelves completely bare, save for a white “Out of…
The gardenias are just beginning to bloom in the mountain ravine. My flowers have finally opened. June 16, a month ago, marked the anniversary of Evil Man Valley. By 2025, it will be the fourth. The modest patch at the front of the house provides more than enough for self-sufficiency,…
Epigraph As a generation born after the 1990s, we rode the waves of marketisation and commercialisation, experiencing the vibrant, dazzling world they ushered in. Unlike our parents’ generation, who were mostly born to farm and did nearly everything by hand, we outsourced the bulk of our daily clothing, necessities, and…
I. Plastic as the Framework of Modern Life Could a modern person get by without plastic? When an American female author prepared to take on the challenge of avoiding plastic for a full day, she soon realised: modern life is virtually impossible without it. Within ten seconds of waking up,…
I am someone who succumbed to pressure; I couldn’t keep playing this game of racing between skyscrapers. Now, I write my story in the hope that as a “failed player” still in flight, I can identify from those past “failures” the things that truly made me feel lonely and depressed,…
In the first decade of the 2000s, repeated food safety scandals prompted a growing number of Chinese consumers to seek out better farming practices and produce. Across the country, a new generation of farmers began pioneering organic agriculture. One such pioneer is this episode’s guest, Cao Xiaohong. In 2008, concerned…
Foodthink Says “Is science oriented towards human needs even possible?” In a modern society that equates science with progress, this ought not to be a question. Yet one of the greatest tragedies of our time is that science, which could have been wielded to help humanity eradicate poverty, hunger, disease,…
