【推荐2】Labeling can be very helpful when determining certain things about a food item. “USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) Organic” and “raised without antibiotics (抗生素)”, for example, have specific standards, and the product will need to be true to those claims.

Natural claims like “all natural”, “100% natural”, and “made with natural ingredients (成分)” are not defined in USDA. The USDA must approve these special claims prior to food being sold, but the only standard they must meet is that artificial ingredients or colors cannot be added during processing, and the processing method cannot fundamentally alter the product. While that is certainly valuable information to know, the problem is in consumers’ understanding of what “natural” means. The definitions do not address human health, the use of synthetic pesticides (合成杀虫剂), hormones, or antibiotics in crop and livestock production.

Study after study on the topic reveals that people think a product labeled as “natural” delivers benefits far beyond what it does. Most consumers mistakenly assign health and environmental benefits to natural-labeled food.

In a 2017 study, respondents incorrectly believed that natural-labeled foods had 18 percent fewer calories across a variety of foods. In a 2010 study, respondents believed that meat products labeled as “all natural” meant no antibiotics or hormones were used to raise the animals. Some also believed the label meant animals were raised free range.

Consumers aren’t getting what they think they’re getting. But the more serious problem is how this harms food producers who are actually meeting the standards for more strict labels that are actually doing good, like ones around organic practices or animal welfare. Farmers and producers doing the work end up at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace if consumers treat foods labeled natural as alike. The economic problem raised by natural labels is that consumers could be paying extra for product benefits they are not receiving while producers of products with those benefits lose sales.

【推荐3】Recycling in general can be an effective way to reuse natural material resources. The U.S.’s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, has proved this point. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work.

The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.   There are thousands of different plastics, each with its own characteristics. They all include different chemicals that cannot be recycled together, making it impossible to sort the trillions of pieces of plastics into separate types for processing. What’s more, plastic recycling costs more than new plastic because collecting, sorting, transporting, and reprocessing plastic waste is very expensive.

Despite this obvious failure, the plastics industry has begun a decades-long campaign to keep the lie that the material is recyclable, which reminds the public of the tobacco industry’s efforts to tell smokers that filtered (过滤的) cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.

Traditional mechanical recycling, in which plastic waste is ground up and melted (熔化), has been around for many decades. Now the plastics industry is promoting the benefits of so-called chemical recycling, in which plastic waste is broken down using high heat and turned into a low-quality fossil fuel. In 2018, Dow Chemical claimed that the Renewlogy chemical-recycling factory in Salt Lake City was able to reprocess mixed plastic waste through the “Hefty EnergyBag” program and turn it into diesel fuel (柴油). As Reuters showed in a 2021 survey, however, the pyrolysis (高温分解) process was not worth it.

We’re not making a case for hopelessness. Just the opposite(相反的). We need the facts so that individuals and policymakers can take action. Proven solutions to the plastic-waste and pollution problems exist and can be quickly copied across the country. These solutions include placing bans on single-use plastic bags and unrecyclable single-use plastic food-service products, and installing dishwashing equipment in schools.

Consumers can put pressure on companies to stop filling store shelves with single-use plastics by not buying them and instead choosing reusables and products in better packaging. And we should all keep recycling our paper, boxes, cans, and glass, because that actually works.

【推荐1】When ice cream maker Adrienne Borlongan first experimented with a White Rabbit flavor, she thought it tasted like “cheap vanilla (香草)”. A few weeks after she added it to her Los Angeles shop, Wanderlust Creamery, visitors showed little interest. But when Borlongan posted a photo of an ice cream cone wrapped in White Rabbit-branded paper, word quickly spread on social media.

The candy, first produced in Shanghai in the 1940s, is known for its red-white-and-blue packaging and is beloved by kids all over China. And when Chinese people began to live in other countries, their love for the white, creamy candy went with them.

Soon after Borlongan posted that photo, people were driving to Wanderlust from all over California. Since then, White Rabbit has been the mainstay of Wanderlust’s ice cream lineup and is regularly sold out in their webshop.

But the story of the ice cream is about way more than taste — it’s about the power of nostalgia (怀旧) and eye-catching branding. White Rabbit’s origins date back to a business called the ABC Company, founded in Shanghai in 1943. It was later sold to the state-owned Guan Sheng Yuan Food Group, which owns it to this day.

The mix of colorful wrappers and the sweet milky taste proved a winner. Kids from Beijing to Hong Kong grew up on the sweets, and it also became a national symbol of the country — most famously, US President Richard Nixon was given some when he made his historic visit to China in 1972.

As for the flavor? The creamy consistency (黏稠度) actually comes from milk, and there’s a piece of rice paper between the candy and the wrapper to prevent melting. Over the years, White Rabbit has tried out other flavors, including red bean and peanut. But it’s the first version that has the most nostalgia connected to it.

[1] The first Chinese characters date from the late Shang Dynasty, some 3, 000 years ago, originally made for the purposes of divination (占卜). They were written on pieces of tortoiseshell and fragments of bone.

[2] During the Shang Dynasty, divination was very important. To those who knew how to read them, it was belief that exhibits of shell and bone could foretell the future, tell you when to sacrifice, when to harvest, and when illness would strike. So, it was these diviners seeking to unlock the future that accidentally provided us with a key to the past. These oracle bones (甲骨) offer us a precious glimpse of life in China some three thousand years ago.

[3] Of the four thousand characters used in these descriptions, so far 1500 have been deciphered. Through them, we can reconstruct a day in the life of a Shang Dynasty man.

[4] It was that by a combination of careful observation and incredible imagination, the people of the Shang dynasty turned what they saw, did, and felt into symbols that could be written on turtle shells and animal bones — the very first Chinese characters.

[5] In pictograph characters like “Tian”, meaning farm, simple lines were used to outline the shape of something. But more abstract concepts could be described, too. For example, a short horizontal stroke above a long one meant “above”, a short stroke below a long one meant “below”. By combining more than one character into one, even more complex ideas could be expressed. Take Jio, meaning wine, for example, a combination of the character for cup or container and water. Other characters would combine one character indicating a certain sound with another specifying meaning. Yang, for example, meaning wander.

[6] Thanks to the Chinese characters on the oracle bones, Chinese civilization could at last be recorded and passed down the generations. Strange as it may seem, the complex system of writing we use today began life thousands of years ago as scratches on bits of bone. Now they're rooted in hearts and minds of more than a billion people.

【推荐2】Efforts of growing organic vegetables that brings much less damage to the farmland paid off as Yunnan Province in southwest China has been trying to deliver its promise to better protect its natural resources.

In the trail field under the management of Yunling Organic Agriculture Development Co., Ltd , the organic matter in soil has been improved while content of some heavy metals has been reduced ever since the organic planting project started in 2017. The green fertilizer they use has left close to little pollution in the soil, which is of critical significance as the field that covers 240 hectares of land is located right in the middle of Kunming Songhuaba Reservoir Nature Reserve.

Now, more than 50 tons of vegetables of more than 20 varieties from the field are sent to places across China every day. Although the price is three to five times higher than that of ordinary vegetables, it is popular in the middle and high-end retail markets in east, central and south China. In Tonghai County, one of the main producing areas, the organic vegetables have begun to enter Southeast Asian market.

“A revolutionary change should be made to the traditional growing mode or cultivation technology. If the zero emission of chemical remains is realized, our problems of environmental pollution will be solved,” said He Jiangming, researcher at the Institute of Horticulture, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences.