Food regulation, foodborne risks, processing, additives, and related safety issues.
In 1902, American chemist Wiley had twelve volunteers risk their bodies to prove borax and formaldehyde dangerous. A century on, borax still appears in cold noodle strips and meatballs, and cumulative effects of approved additives remain inadequately assessed. The simplest defence: avoid crispy, jelly-like, heavily flavoured foods; buy whole.
A city office worker with zero experience picks plastic fragments by hand and tugs half-buried plastic twine on a 20-square-metre plot in the Beijing suburbs. The more she clears, the more appears—and her anxiety spreads from one field to pressing questions about recycling systems and consumption habits.
No pesticides, no regard for yield: from their own bayberry trees to industrialised variety breeding, a southern farmer argues that store-bought fruit grows sweeter, bigger, and hardier in storage and transit, yet its nutrients decline — and every purchase votes for capital’s choices.
On 31 May, Foodthink invites Professor Lü Chensheng, author of The Vanishing Bees, to DT51 RDV Bookshop in Beijing to discuss the ecological and health risks of neonicotinoid insecticides, from seed to table.
After the 1922 botulism poisoning of eight people at Loch Maree, the “germ theory” swept into kitchens via the public health movement. Domino Sugar, Heinz, Nabisco and others exploited the moment to amplify microbial fear, replacing pickles and bread made at home for generations with packaged food.
Oyster sauce, salad dressing, “No Added Sucrose” drinks—added sugar is embedded in four-fifths of supermarket products. Spot the disguises on the ingredients list, see how the Bliss Point turns sweetness into addiction, to protect yourself in a world besieged by sugar.
Milk travelled the world on Dutch merchant ships, came to the table in Shanghai, and over more than a century was shaped by advertising, scientific discourse and nationalism into a drink for strengthening the nation and the race; after the melamine incident, Chinese people with lactose intolerance still put it on their everyday table.
Smallholder farms were not the main cause of the 2008 melamine incident, and large farms hold no advantage in feed management, cattle disease prevention, or processing transparency. The roughly 0.2 g protein gap per 100 g is negligible for Chinese residents whose protein intake is already adequate.
Mixed-loading in tankers is only the surface issue. Supermarket vegetable oil – n-hexane-extracted, refined through two rounds of high heat – still harbours solvent residue, trans fat and excess ω-6. Low-temperature cooking and eating nuts plain are a stupid way around them.
Wheat bran sifted out during milling, repackaged as “wheat germ flour”, suddenly doubles in value; today’s rice and flour, fine-milled and laced with additives, are already ultra-processed foods — yet a home grain mill and mixed-grain and bean porridge can still restore staples to their original form.
