Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
In the salt-scarce, damp highlands, the Miao ancestors who migrated south to Yunnan-Guizhou replaced salt with fermented sourness. From rice-water white sour soup to tomato-and-chilli red sour soup, it has seeped into daily meals and festival rituals across all Guizhou’s peoples.
In Villain Valley, Fujian, Grandma Kouzi builds this permaculture system through layered planting, duck-shelter symbiosis and perennial herbaceous crops — plant once, eat for a lifetime, and the primary task of humans is simply to harvest.
In Britain’s world food system, class and race determined who could eat their fill, famine was “outsourced” to Ireland and India, and industrialised slaughter hid its violence at “the end of the earth”.
Videos of Zhejiang and Shanghai incineration plants “competing for waste” across provinces and municipalities went viral. But waste management advocates point out that overcapacity is the reality – legally mandated dioxin data, tested only once a year, is far from “real-time monitoring”.
Kouzi, a farmer at the Valley of Villains, accompanied her parents through their final four and forty-four days in the ICU. She has since signed an advance directive, refusing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a mechanical ventilator and oesophageal tube feeding – fighting for a natural farewell not blocked by instruments.
On the edge of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, farmer Louis spent 16 years transforming a banana monoculture into an agroforestry “forest”; philosophy graduate Zhang Zhiwei, who laboured on African and Brazilian farms for nearly a year, now plans to bring this method back to Yunnan.
A former agriculture reporter covered feed market prices and live hog shipments for two and a half years – yet stories mostly came from listed companies’ earnings, and food was always just figures. Renting a plot, chasing abscessed pork: neither closed the gap between commercial framing and the field.
Riders eat just twice a day, pushing through peak delivery hours on biscuits and flatbread snacks. Medical studies across multiple countries show that the dietary imbalance and chronic stress wrought by intense delivery work are driving up gig workers’ risk of depression, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Living alone, young people scroll their phones while eating. Some feel it brings companionship, some grow emptier the more they watch, and others discover that sitting down to eat properly with someone close, or cooking a meal by hand, beats any “mealtime” video.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., riding the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, has axed 3,500 FDA staff, slashed its budget by $400 million and suspended the food-testing sampling programme — hitting an agency already short-staffed and embroiled in several recent fatal food safety incidents.
