The weekend is here #MilkTeaAlliance & here is the events🧵
Many friends & allies been celebrating Thingyan, Songkran, Pi Mai (New year in Myanmar, Thailand & Laos respectively) but for those in exile it can also have a bittersweet flavour,
@thinink.bsky.social's latest well worth a read.
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I used to love April. Thingyan. Water fights. Family. Food.
Now it’s mostly memory & an uneasy feeling that those memories are changing the further I get.
So I wrote about nostalgia, exile, Myanmar, & why food is sometimes the last place you can still call home.
news.thin-ink.net/p/the-ghosts...
It's New Year Day in Myanmar, but the military is still in power. In this diary, a Shan journalist wrote about what happened during a 2021 protest against the coup.
"The tear gas kept coming until it was so dense the billowing smoke obscured everything," they wrote.
kite-tales.org/en/article/u...
Mathias Corvinus Collegium -which Orban used to fund Christian Right across Europe - has endowment worth *1% of Hungary’s GDP*
This money has gone to Matt Goodwin, Frank Furedi, a Roger Scruton foundation run by Michael Gove + James Orr
Magyar needs 2/3rd of seats to unpick this. Be huge if he can
Hungary, welcome back 🇭🇺🇪🇺
This is a turning point for Europe. The times of autocratic backsliding must be over. We look to a brighter and united future.
Defending rule of law, freedom and democracy.
Tonight, we celebrate in the streets of Budapest.
As someone who has been able to vote only once in her life (so far), and whose country just had a sham of an election a few months ago, I do love to see when elections work.
💥🇭🇺🗳️ BREAKING: Péter Magyar says Viktor Orbán called to concede and congratulate him.
Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister and, as it stands, is set to secure a 2/3 supermajority – enough to fully dismantle Orbán’s system.
A 16-year chapter is over.
i hope the white house sends vance to campaign for Reform in britain
An excellent article! I was reminded of the way Elizabeth David writes about the blow British cooking suffered from rationing, and why modern British staples are so multicultural. This book is going straight on the wishlist.
🍛 I spoke to Mike for this week's Thin Ink about the urgent need to protect our food cultures, not as something to preserve unchanged, but as something that carries history, identity, and meaning.
🌏 It moves across places and histories: from the Czech Republic to Rohingya communities to the Uyghurs to New Mexico, showing how food cultures are reshaped or lost under pressure.
♨ That's the argument Michael Shaikh, friend & former human rights investigator, made in his beautiful, inspiring, & enraging book The Last Sweet Bite.
💥💣🚀 It tackles the erasure of culinary traditions through state violence with a lightness of touch that keeps you reading.
🥘🍳🔥 Why do we have laws protecting cultural heritage like art and architecture during war but not food? Isn't food, especially the kind cooked at home, a form of culture worth protecting, comparable to a manuscript or a monument?
news.thin-ink.net/p/the-fight-...
Reading the EU report, it was hard not to think of what’s no longer there: Sustainable Food Systems initiative, abandoned as of last week.
Instead of going into my shell, I'm doubling down on celebrating wins (new special rapporteur!) & supporting people doing good work (like ENB). See the issue.
4. Resilient Food Systems Index:
• 15 countries produce 70% of food
• climate preparedness = weakest link
• healthy diets still unaffordable for many
5. EU climate report (360 pages, I skimmed key sections):
→ agriculture is central to emissions
→ progress is slow
→ policy is incoherent
2. Asset manager capitalism
BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street = ~$25 trillion
In 2024:
❌ voted against social/env reforms
✅ backed payouts + political spending
3. UCSF paper: Fossil fuels, tobacco, UPF, chemicals, alcohol = 31% of global deaths.
Shaping
→ science
→ regulation
→ the narrative
It's time for another roundup of reports!
1. Big Tech meets Big Ag = control over data, decisions, and ultimately farming itself.
@ipes-food.org's report. Digital ag isn't just tools, but systems that make alternatives harder over time.
news.thin-ink.net/p/what-ive-b...
If meat is defended as culture & tradition, why does that concern so rarely extend to protecting the animals themselves, especially when they're most vulnerable?
Kudos to the journos who worked on this important piece: Leoni Bender, Louisa Bouri-Saouter, Maria Dybcio, Martin Vrba, & Raluca Besliu.
This isn’t just about data. It’s about how systems are designed:
– disaster plans rarely include animals
– compensation is patchy
– responsibility is fragmented
Yet, livestock is politically central, with heated debates on:
– what to call plant-based foods
– how eating meat is “tradition”
When floods hit, governments track:
– human casualties
– infrastructure damage
– economic losses
But livestock?
Often uncounted.
Often uncompensated.
Animals die “unseen and uncounted,” and farmers absorb the losses.
We count the cost of climate disasters in Europe.
But not always the animals.
A new investigation looks at what happens to livestock during floods — and what it reveals about policy blind spots.
🧵
news.thin-ink.net/p/the-animal...
I hope you give it a read. And if you’re persuaded, consider signing the GoodFoodForAll European Citizens’ Initiative at www.goodfoodforall.eu, which aims to force European leaders to finally confront the issue.
This week’s guest post tackles that disconnect head-on. Drawing on research from community kitchens across Spain, it explores what hunger actually looks like in wealthy European societies and what it might take to guarantee access to good food with dignity.
... when there are many more pressing food challenges policymakers in Brussels could be tackling. Like the fact that 42 mln people in Europe cannot afford a proper meal every 2 days, and that the right to food is not enshrined in the constitutions of most EU countries.
ec.europa.eu/eurostat/dat...
There's a long-running debate in EU over names of plant-based products which has always perplexed me, a carnivore, who has never accidentally bought a plant-based alternative thinking it was meat. I also found it aggravating the issue has taken up so much oxygen...
news.thin-ink.net/p/the-saturd...
But they also come with enormous environmental & economic costs. We're also overusing them: <50% of nitrogen fertiliser actually ends up in crops. Yet fertiliser companies have seen profits surge while farmers struggle with rising input costs.
Can we get out of this snare we've set for ourselves?
But the history of fertilisers is both fascinating & uncomfortable: guano mined with slave labour, bone powder, a chemical process hailed as helping to feed billions, but also fuelled World War I.
Today, fertilisers are responsible for a big share of modern food production.
It starts with the name for fertiliser from my childhood in Myanmar: မြေဩဇာ, a portmanteau of soil (မြေ) with influence or power accumulated through wisdom, virtue and respect (ဩဇာ).
Words have meaning & the underlying message this one projects to farmers & ordinary people alike is unmistakeable.
Fertilisers have been making headlines again: U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran are causing a vital transport route to come to a standstill.
There're lots of great stories so I thought where I could add value was to step back & offer an explainer beyond current crisis.
news.thin-ink.net/p/the-fertil...
But there are people far better qualified than me to dissect the immediate fallout (see Thin’s Pickings).
So I decided to stick to what I had planned, which also speaks to a community disproportionately affected by both conflict and climate change: women.