Asia, Food | featured news

Yong-Hee Kim still can't believe that in a prosperous country like Germany, powdered baby formula would ever be rationed and that she would have to scour shops in the German capital to find the right brand for her 13-month-old son.

It’s not yet light, but Mr Qiu of Foshan in Guangdong is busy transferring king ratsnakes from a cage into a sack. He then tips them into a boiling pot. He’s been running his snake-soup shop for over a decade. In winter, residents of Guangdong province, south China, pay particular attention to diet and nutrition, meaning the shop is constantly busy. A bowl of piping hot snake soup is a breakfast favourite for many locals looking to ward off the cold. “We Cantonese have always believed that snake meat can treat illnesses, plus its nutritious and keeps out the cold,” Qiu says.

Trumpeted as earthy in flavor and smooth on the palate, the exotic new brew is made from beans eaten by Thai elephants and plucked a day later from their dung. A gut reaction inside the elephant creates what its founder calls the coffee's unique taste.

European private-equity firm Permira said it would buy Japanese sushi chain Akindo Sushiro for around $1 billion, making a bet that the popular restaurant brand can expand beyond Japan.

North Korea says that before Kim Jong Il's death the United States offered to provide food aid if Pyongyang halted its uranium enrichment program. North Korea responded angrily to the offer Wednesday, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman accusing Washington of "politicizing" food shipments.

The European Union said Monday it will restart food aid to North Korea after the country's repressive communist regime agreed to an unprecedented monitoring system as it suffers through its worst food crisis in years.

Remind us not to write about the food in Taiwan. On Tuesday, a blogger in Taiwan was sentenced to a month of detention and two years probation for writing that a restaurant's beef noodles were "too salty."

Watermelons have been bursting by the score in eastern China after farmers gave them overdoses of growth chemicals during wet weather, creating what state media called fields of "land mines."

Hunger was such a constant companion in Yao Qizhong's childhood that even now, at age 40, he'll stoop down to salvage a single clove of garlic that falls from his table at the Beijing market where he hawks fresh produce....

In the wake of Japan's nuclear disaster, all milk, milk products, fresh vegetables and fruit from one of four prefectures closest to the quake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will be prevented from entering the United States, a spokesperson for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.