Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
Grandma Kouzi at Villain’s Valley in Fujian harvested over a hundred pumpkins and over a hundred jin of beans, grains and peanuts in 2025—full food self-sufficiency except salt. A single batch of air-fryer roasted pumpkin sustains a day’s staple food.
Food-history researcher Zhang Sirui traces milk’s path to globalisation: once a “barbaric drink” to the ancient Greeks, an everyday beverage in China for barely more than a century, its history interwoven with science, politics and global trade.
The melamine incident was not the fault of small dairy farmers, nor are large pastures necessarily safer at the production, distribution, and processing stages. With residents’ protein intake already adequate, the nutritional gap between the two types of milk is negligible.
Solvent extraction dissolves oil with n-hexane, then subjects it to two rounds of high-temperature decolourisation and deodorisation; solvent residues, trans fat and excess omega-6 are hard to avoid. Nuts, home-pressed oil and low-temperature cooking offer alternatives.
In Tacheng, Shangri-La, golden sparrow flowers must be picked before the buds open, and shepherd’s purse can only be dug up with flower scissors to hand—like eating wild mushrooms in the rainy season, eating wild edibles in spring is an instinct etched into Yunnanese genes.
Readers from Beijing, Tokyo, Guangzhou, Chiang Mai and beyond share their everyday lives with the market: hidden-gem stalls, grocery-buying tips, the warmth of exchanges with stallholders—and—squeezed by supermarkets and e-commerce—where the market goes from here.
A bottle of twenty-year-old mother brine brought from Changsha, a handful of sourdough starter passed down through several generations by a friend — in my kitchen in Berlin, these microbes reconnect me with home, friends and the four seasons.
The bran sifted out during flour milling is toasted until fragrant, ground fine, and packaged as “wheat germ flour” to be sold back at a premium. Polished rice and refined flour, having undergone excessive extraction and addition, have become ultra-processed food.
Guizhou sour broth, Shanxi Naotou breakfast soup, Kunming eggplant za, Wuyuan Qigao (Wuyuan steamed rice cake)… Fermentation most vividly reveals a region’s local flavour and customs. This holiday, follow diners’ hometown memories and seek out the tangy aroma in jars and crocks across the country.
Beyond the Xibei pre-made meals controversy, small shops that stir-fry to order are being squeezed by central kitchens, local food memories are fading, and exhausted parents and international students may well have long since become unable to do without pre-made meals.
