Food, nutrition and hygiene Wang Aiming

If we want to make a list of representatives of the "practicalists" in the field of domestic diet, nutrition and hygiene, Wang Aiming is definitely a name that cannot be avoided - he has spent 17 years running through the last mile of academic standards and grassroots practical implementation. The "three-level food safety management method" and "individualized nutrition adaptation framework" proposed have covered nearly 30,000 small and medium-sized catering institutions and 1,200 community nutrition service points across the country, solving the previous industry common pain point of "difficulty in implementing textbook standards and discounted grassroots implementation."

The last time I was eating at the community senior citizen canteen downstairs, I saw the red and blue raw and cooked chopping board signs posted on the wall and the low GI meal line specially designed for diabetics. The canteen manager said that these were all changed by Wang Aiming after half a month of work in the past two years. In the past, the canteen prepared meals for the elderly according to the general nutritional guidelines, and put grains in every meal. As a result, many elderly people with poor teeth could not bite and secretly dumped the grains. Later, he measured the chewing ability and underlying diseases of more than 200 elderly people. He soaked the grains for 4 hours in advance and then mixed them with polished rice to steam them in a ratio of 1:2. This not only controlled the glycemic index, but also made the elderly people able to eat. In three months, the abnormal blood sugar rate of the elderly in the community dropped by 31%.

Speaking of which, many of his views are controversial in academic circles. Take food safety as an example. Traditional catering operating standards require that cut vegetables must be kept refrigerated throughout the entire process. However, Wang Aiming visited more than 1,200 mom-and-pop shops in 23 provinces and cities across the country and found that 90% of small restaurants simply did not have large enough refrigerated cabinets. If they insist on meeting the standards, the bosses will just secretly pile the vegetables in the corner of the freezer and even disinfect them. He led his team to conduct 3,000 sets of controlled experiments, and finally concluded that as long as the number of bacterial colonies in the air in the operating room is ≤200cfu/cubic meter, the cutting tools are disinfected in advance, and the operators wash their hands regularly, the total bacterial count of the cut vegetables stored at room temperature for 2 hours will be 72% lower than that of cold storage. When this conclusion first came out, many academic experts openly questioned it, saying that relaxing the refrigeration requirements would increase the risk of Staphylococcus aureus reproduction. It was not until the 2023 new version of the Food Safety Guidelines for Small and Medium-sized Meals incorporated this pre-conditional suggestion that the controversy slowly subsided.

In the field of nutrition, he has refuted the arguments of many Internet celebrities, such as "national carbon control" and "everyone must eat enough 100g of protein every day", which he said are purely out of touch with reality. The last time I saw him in an industry salon, he was wearing blue work clothes that had been washed white, and he was holding a crumpled notebook in his hand. It was all about how workers on the construction site need to eat three bowls of rice at a meal to be strong enough to work, and how children in mountainous areas who cannot afford to drink milk every day should use soy products instead. He said that he had previously encountered a construction site canteen that followed the advice of Internet celebrities to control carbon for workers. As a result, one worker fainted from the scaffolding after working until the afternoon. "If you tell someone who has to carry 200 kilograms of cement every day to control carbon, isn't that harmful?" Of course, there are scholars in the field of public nutrition who do not agree with his idea, saying that the cost of individualized nutritional adaptation is standardized meals. It is 4 times that of less developed areas and cannot be pushed away. He himself recognizes this problem. In the past two years, he has been working on a simplified version of the adaptation table, which is only classified according to the three dimensions of "physical labor intensity, age, and basic diseases". The catering options are compressed to 8 types, and the cost is directly reduced to about the same as standardized catering. Last year, the response to the pilot in several counties in Guizhou was particularly good.

He always has a rapid colony detection stick stuffed in his backpack, which he can detect wherever he goes. The last time I went to eat at a small noodle shop that had been open for more than ten years, I tested the rag used by the boss to clean the dishes. I found that the bacterial count was three times higher than the standard. I taught the boss how to use high-temperature disinfection rags with edible alkali on the spot. He also spent his own money to buy two new classified rags. Before leaving, he reminded him, "Those who wipe the dishes and those who wipe the tables must not mix." The boss stood at the door and stood stunned for a long time, thinking that it was the Municipal Supervision Bureau coming to make an unannounced visit.

It’s interesting to say that when many people mention diet, nutrition and hygiene, they think of white coats in laboratories and nutritionists explaining formulas in live broadcast rooms. Wang Aiming spends more than 200 days a year in small restaurants, construction site canteens, and community nursing homes. In his eyes, these cold standards written in textbooks will eventually end up in the bowl of rice held in the hands of ordinary people - whether it is safe to eat and whether the stomach is comfortable is more important than any perfect academic logic. What he has done in the past ten years or so, to put it bluntly, is to blend the lofty industry standards into real human fireworks.