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.
Zhang Kai of Fenye Brewing and Xu Xin of Mars Elephant Lab use a single grain to bridge brewing and baking—from spent-grain biscuits to an Earth Day beer brewed from leftover bread from ten Beijing bakeries—reflecting the practical challenges of the local grain supply chain.
Ecological farm owners in Shunyi, Changping and Baoding have endured year after year of torrential rain flooding their fields, making difficult adjustments from digging drainage trenches to switching crops, yet remain trapped by the absence of public drainage and ever-mounting costs.
Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, Chengzi took root for three months at Lexiangu Community Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai—growing vegetables, repairing roofs, leading goats and feeding ducks, running a market stall—and grew the courage to explore out of her uncertainty about the future.
Farm owner Zhen Rui’s two staff were swept three to four hundred metres by floodwater before escaping from their sleep in the small hours. Their 450 mu of land and nearly thirty million yuan invested over more than a decade were wiped out overnight—with no evacuation notice.
At a slaughterhouse in eastern Sichuan, over ¥100 million in investment, daily beef sales mean pre-dawn complaint barrages, lost orders over scarce back sirloin, and blood stench that won’t wash off — nineteen years of education shattered by the butchers’ flexibility.
Zou Lei, a Minzu University of China doctoral student, finds through Yunnan fieldwork that Tall-legged, Frizzled Black-boned and other local breeds vanish one by one under the twin pressures of the migrant-labour exodus and imported broilers, severing the breeds Miao betrothals and the Yi Torch Festival depend on.
Sourdough, olive oil and flaked sea salt have become the hottest items on UK supermarket shelves, behind which lies the anti-ultra-processed food movement sparked by the #UPF hashtag on TikTok. But Waitrose caters primarily to middle-class consumers, and “eating clean” is being packaged as a new consumption hierarchy.
Lufeng’s lychees have had a bumper crop year, yet without a centralised collection point, local smallholders have no alternative to courier shipping. Courier and packaging fees eat up about a third of each order’s revenue—so those bountiful red fruits still don’t come cheap for consumers.
Aged 61, Sun Wenxiang carries fertiliser, weeds and raises pigs in Qilong Village, Hongya County. He has preserved more than 12 heritage rice seed varieties yet receives no policy subsidies, and whether his daughter will take over remains uncertain.
