A young native of Zhenhua Village, Bayan County, returns to plan a wedding. Only fourteen of over seventy households remain, with just two relatives’ homes left to stay at. Great-Uncle has started talking of city retirement, once he can no longer carry the firewood.
Foodthink, in partnership with Junqiao Crazy Farm, is hosting a three-day co-learning camp in Chongzhou, Chengdu. Led by Luo Lishuang and Huang Guoliang, the curriculum centres on three themes – soil, plants, and animals – paired with hands-on field practice such as composting and fermented plant extract.
From avocado cultivation draining South America’s water resources, to newborn calves sent straight to the abattoir, to Sucralose on ingredient lists — people have decided to stop buying certain foods, out of concern for the environment, animals, food safety, or a collapse of trust.
At Gudao Xifeng Manor in Haidian, Beijing, Brother Daotian — not formally trained — has kept a business afloat through pesticide-free ecological farming and over a hundred mu of sublet vegetable plots, while more than half of shared garden projects nationwide remain mired in losses.
Foodthink’s fourth co-learning camp, in October at Junqiao Crazy Farm, Chongzhou, is led by Luo Lishuang and Huang Guoliang—over 20 years in ecological cultivation. Starting from carbon source supplementation, it explores soil-crop relationships. 20 places for ecological smallholder farmers from Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan and Chongqing.
The film traces imported frozen beef and mutton from Xining markets driving down herders’ cattle and sheep purchase prices and livelihoods around Qinghai Lake. Post-screening, scholars discuss who bears the cost in the global meat supply chain and whether ordinary consumers can influence the other end of production.
In Jianyang, Sichuan, farmers pick up binoculars and finally see the egrets and kingfishers pecking grain in their fields daily. Pesticides climb the food chain to the birds in the sky; tomato netting tangles and kills collared scops owls; the “cleaner” the farmland, the less room for other life.
Grandma Kouzi of Villain Valley cuts a path for pumpkins, felling white ginger lilies loved for over a decade. After five years, hardy bananas proved they could fruit; she learned to leave care to the seasons—from “plant killer” to one who shares her fate with the land.
Auntie Huang in Hengzhou’s jasmine flower fields, Auntie Lu in Yingde’s tea gardens—both rely on decades of practised hand-and-eye judgement to know which flower to pick, which leaf to pluck. This experience cannot be written into machine instructions, yet is always classed as “requiring little technical skill.”
Forty-five days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, she walked into a Chaozhou mooncake factory to dust moulds—seven or eight thousand a day, hands never stopping. The conveyor line’s roar, the old master’s hand-over-hand laobing lessons, and workers’ chatter about freedom all marked the start of her gig life.
