Some 72% of American consumers say that product packaging influences their purchase decisions — a statistic not lost on food producers. This applies to not just the appearance design of packaging but what the labels say as well.

Louis Biscotti, the National Leader for Food & Beverage (饮料) Services Group, says that when the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) updated its nutrition facts label for packaged foods in 2020, companies found new opportunities to increase sales. “The information on the FDA label and what you pack onto your label and packaging can be important factors in boosting sales.” He adds that 30% of U.S. consumers surveyed are more likely to buy products with sustainable certificates and that “clean label” characteristics can “win over consumers”.

A new report from the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) Economic Research Service takes a look at the popularity of the “natural” claim on food packaging — and it’s eye-opening. Study after study on the topic reveals that people think a product labeled as “natural” delivers benefits far beyond what it does, with most consumers mistakenly assigning health and environmental stewardship (管理) attributes to natural-labeled food.

At first, this might simply seem frustrating—that food producers capitalize on consumer simplicity to boost prices. And that 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 attributes they are not receiving while producers of products with those attributes lose sales,” says Louis Biscotti. “As a consequence, any health and environmental stewardship benefits that might have been realized from consumers choosing products that matched their preferences could be lost.”

Singapore’s tradition of eating out in places called hawker centers is now recognized by the United Nations for its cultural importance.

A hawker is a person who sells food or goods and advertises by shouting at people walking by on the street. Hawkers are an important part of Singaporean culture. Open-air eating areas where hawkers sell their goods are very popular. Famous chefs, such as Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay have praised them.

On Wednesday, the United Nations, cultural agency, UNESCO, added the city’s ”hawker culture“ to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Singapore looked for ways to have hawker culture added to the list about two years ago. Now that it has been recognized, Singapore must provide a report every six years to UNESCO. The report must show efforts the city-state has made to save and support its hawker culture.

“These centers serve as ‘community dining rooms’, where people from different backgrounds gather and share the experience of dining over breakfast, lunch and dinner,” UNESCO said.

In the 1970s, Singapore cleaned up its streets so the city moved street hawkers to new eating centers. These areas were part of an effort to improve the island. Now, the centers offer many different low-cost meals for local people and provide a pleasing social setting. The 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians showed its stars enjoying meals at a famous night market. Some sellers even received Michelin stars from a famous restaurant rating system for their meals costing only a few dollars.

But now the average age of a hawker in Singapore is 60 years old. Younger Singaporeans now want to work in offices. They are less interested in working in small restaurants. The COVID-19 health crisis also hurt sales, preventing foreign visitors and locals from eating out.

Why is the world’s population growing? 【小题1】. The reason for the explosion is not that people have been reproducing like rabbits, but that people have stopped dropping dead like flies. In 1900, people died at the average age of 30. By 2000 the average age was 65. But while increasing health was a typical feature of the 20th century, declining birth rate could be a defining one of the twenty-first century.

Statistics show that the average number of births per woman has fallen from 4.9 in the early 1960s to 2.5 nowadays. Furthermore, around 50% of the world’s population live in regions where the figure is now below the replacement level (i.e. 2.1 births per woman) and almost all developed nations are experiencing sub-replacement birth rate. 【小题2】, but you’d be wrong. Declining birth rate is a major problem in many developing regions too, which might cause catastrophic global shortages of work force within a few decades.

【小题3】What does it imply? First, China needs to undergo rapid economic development before a population decline hits the country. Second, if other factors such as technology remain constant, economic growth and material expectations will fall well below recent standards and this could invite trouble.

Russia is another country with population problems that could break its economic promise. Since 1992 the number of people dying has been bigger than that of those being born by a massive 50%. Indeed official figures suggest the country has shrunk by 5% since 1993 and people in Russia live a shorter life now than those in 1961. 【小题4】Nobody is quite sure, but poor diet and above all long-time alcoholism have much to do with it. If current trends don’t bend, Russia’s population will be about the size of Yemen’s by the year 2050.

【小题5】As for the USA, it is almost unique among developed nations in having a population that is expected to grow by 20% from 2010—2030. Moreover, the USA has a track record of successfully accepting immigrants. As a result it’s likely to see a rise in the size of its working-age population and to witness strong economic growth over the longer term.