2026: Open Minds, Rethink the Staple | Grandma Kouzi
Looking back at 2025, it opened as a year of loss, as we said goodbye to my mother. Returning to the “Valley of the Wicked”, I welcomed a succession of harvests. From spring onwards, I gathered rapeseed—twenty to twenty-five kilos—yielding more oil than I could possibly use in a year. This year’s harvest brought in over a hundred pumpkins, fifty-plus kilos of assorted beans, fifty-plus kilos of various grains, fifty-plus kilos of peanuts, and another fifty-plus kilos of corn, achieving complete self-sufficiency in food save for salt……
Today, let’s discuss what matters most to you all: grain, or rather, the staple foods we simply cannot live without.
I. Pumpkin as a Staple Food
A foodie eats in the moment and makes the best of whatever comes along. A while back, corn was overflowing, so I was gnawing on it every day. Now fortune’s wheel has turned to pumpkins, and the situation is rather dire: they’ve become a sweet burden—there’s simply no chance of finishing them all.
Letting the pumpkins ripen fully on the vine is hardly a problem. Once they’ve taken a frost, they keep remarkably well—I can easily eat them right through to 2026. Hanging above the only path into the courtyard, they’ve become that familiar sight I keep ducking under. The real trouble is the insects. A single puncture from a fruit fly triggers what I call ‘pumpkin suicide’. Far too many middle-aged pumpkins simply drop themselves off the vine. Once the larvae hatch, the decay works from the inside out, so the only sensible move is to eat them before they turn.
In the past, I mainly ate pumpkin boiled into rice porridge, steamed, or blended into soy milk. My consumption was limited, and I was highly particular about the fruit. Only pumpkins that have aged properly develop sweetness, and variety matters greatly—watery flesh simply does not taste right. Yet Fujian’s climate is relentlessly damp. As the old proverb warns, move an orange tree south of the Huai River and it turns to bitter citron; similarly, the environment here fundamentally alters the crop. Many northern varieties prized for their dense, floury texture turn disappointingly watery in my garden. It is an impossible choice: I cannot have both sweetness and that starchy mouthfeel, leaving me torn between a fondness for the vegetable and its poor performance here.
Lately, I’ve devised a new method: slice the pumpkin thick (thinner than five millimetres scorches too easily, while anything over ten will not cook through), then air-fry at 180 °C for thirty minutes, flipping halfway. This approach forgives every variety and turns watery flesh to its advantage. The heat drives off excess moisture and concentrates the natural sugars. The result is a skin that yields with a pleasant bounce and a flesh that melts softly. The flavour simply transforms.
Pumpkin has even graduated to staple status. Take today’s lunch for example: an oven-load of roasted pumpkin, two salted duck eggs, accompanied by a pot of floral and vegetable soup. The blooms are hibiscus, roselle, and okra blossoms; the greens feature loofah, bottle gourd, and tender mulberry leaves. I tossed in a handful of pre-soaked peanuts and some boiled, frozen yellow beans. With over a dozen ingredients creating a vibrant medley, it fits squarely within the principles of a Mediterranean diet. The soup base is a turmeric broth, a classic pre-prepared mix from Evil Valley. Turmeric takes centre stage, followed in descending order by daylily blossoms, cherry tomatoes, spring onions, ginger, garlic, salt, Chinese pepper, and black pepper. It’s gently simmered for over two hours until reduced, then portioned and frozen. Thaw whatever you need at the moment of cooking, and you’ll have a proper slow-simmered broth ready in just five minutes.
I’ve been talking about pumpkin quite a bit, simply because it’s been my staple of choice lately. What? Pumpkin as a staple, really?
What ought a staple food to look like? Why can’t pumpkin fit the bill?
II. A Staple for the Modern Era
We tend to equate staple foods with carbohydrate-rich grain crops. Rice and steamed buns primarily serve an energy requirement. During the hunter-gatherer era, survival demanded immense physical exertion, and populations able to consume high-calorie staples were more likely to thrive in natural selection. Throughout this long evolutionary journey, human labour was indispensable. The more staple food available, the better; the more refined, the preferable. Coarser grains were only considered when finer options fell short. A shortage of staples would quickly leave a person looking gaunt and malnourished.
I was born in the 1960s and know what hunger feels like. During my primary school years, half of my rationed allowance was coarse grain, and eating refined grain at every meal was an unattainable luxury. Back then, telling someone they had put on weight was considered a compliment—a trope that even appears in the works of Lu Xun. As we all know, the standard of praise has since shifted entirely to “you’ve lost weight”.
In times of scarcity, meeting energy needs took precedence; in times of abundance, the focus has shifted towards nutritional quality. In an era that prizes a slender figure, the combination of refined carbohydrates and refined oils has become a “sugar-and-oil bomb” threatening modern health. The priority must now move from calories to nutrition, emphasising protein, trace minerals, and dietary fibre. By this metric, meat, eggs, and dairy are top performers. In fitness circles, consuming seven or eight eggs a day is hardly unusual—they have effectively taken on the role of a staple food. The diet of Italian supercentenarian Emma Morano remained virtually unchanged for nearly a century: three eggs for breakfast, a fried egg for lunch, and chicken for dinner. She lived to 117. Her regimen is often referred to as the “chicken diet” or the “egg diet”, making clear that eggs and chicken were, in effect, her staple foods.
Maize, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and eggs can all serve as staple foods, and pumpkin is no exception. Pumpkin provides high-quality carbohydrates that meet my primary daily energy requirements. Its protein content exceeds that of rice and wheat, and it is rich in potassium, calcium, and magnesium. It is undoubtedly a perfectly adequate staple and, frankly, a dietary treasure.
At Evil People Valley, there are no rigid rules for staple foods. We generally eat what we have, prioritise local and seasonal produce, and let the harvest dictate the menu. During pumpkin season, it’s roasted pumpkin every day; during corn season, it’s boiled corn. I expect my list of staples will soon expand to include mixed beans and tempeh. The 2025 legume harvest has been excellent. We grew more than a dozen varieties of leguminous crops. Setting aside those eaten fresh—such as French beans, yardlong beans, broad beans, snow peas, and winged beans—the storable varieties include soybeans, mung beans, black beans (both yellow- and green-seeded), edamame, white kidney beans, purple kidney beans, and yellow flower beans. Excluding what was harvested and eaten straight away, we dried and weighed the rest a few days ago, coming to over fifty kilograms. After several years of trial and error, I finally mastered homemade tempeh, but our bean yield was initially too low. At best, we harvested fifteen kilograms of soy and black beans per year, which averaged out to less than fifty grams a day—not even enough to make soy milk without careful rationing. Now, with around one hundred and fifty grams of beans per day, I can finally achieve what you might call ‘tempeh freedom’, eating it freely and treating it as a “staple”. There’s no need to dwell on the benefits of tempeh; harping on it would only come across as humblebragging and might well earn me a friendly rebuke.
III. How Staple Foods Reached Our Tables
For American children of that era, spinach simply meant the tins on supermarket shelves, and the same applied to other vegetables. The situation isn’t so different here; many children today have no idea how *mantou* (steamed buns) is made from wheat.
Against the backdrop of industrialised production and globalised distribution, staple foods have seen their raw ingredients refined to an ever finer degree, while the foods themselves have grown increasingly processed and commodified. Fifty or sixty years ago, every household in my hometown would buy flour and knead and steam their own buns. Today, ready-made buns are the norm, mostly bought from roadside stalls and bustling bun shops, with the remainder coming from supermarket fridges or online retailers.
*Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us* points out that the average American consumes twice the recommended amount of these three components, and today’s figures for Chinese people are even higher. These health-threatening excesses do not come from condiment bottles on the dining table, but rather from the trillion-dollar processed food industry and its array of ready-to-eat manufactured products.Crisps, sweets, cakes, milk tea, and ever-evolving sweetened drinks… More additives yield higher profits and greater indulgence, but also bring more health complications.
Food advertisements in America around the Second World War peddled various narratives of ‘women’s liberation’: with nothing more than a pair of scissors, a steamer or a microwave, a housewife could effortlessly conjure up a lavish feast for the entire family. The twentieth century also ushered in the modern, standardised kitchen, where near-identical refrigerators were stocked with similarly uniform processed or semi-processed foods. Modernisation standardised the kitchen, and industrialisation took over the dinner table.
Industrialised production and globalised distribution are an irreversible trend. Yet, in an age of such abundance, we modern folk ought to be clever enough to find ways to coexist with it, harnessing the benefits of progress rather than being consumed by them.
Thanks to the complete supply chains of a manufacturing powerhouse, household rice mills, oil presses, and grain grinders are both excellent value and easily ordered online. With these at my disposal, the wheat, rice, peanuts, and rapeseeds harvested in my secluded valley are kept as whole grains, and I only process what I plan to eat. The shelf life isn’t two years or two months; it’s probably less than two weeks. But with zero additives, I’m not worried about it going off.
By this point, some of you will be labelling me a humblebragger. But I haven’t written all this just to show off and invite criticism. I’m simply saying: you can do this too.
IV. The Form of Staples
Modern people, being as clever as we are, might just unshackle our minds and break the mould when it comes to staples.
With online shopping now so well established, offering excellent value and quality, we can buy everything from ready-made products to raw ingredients. I’ve always held that ‘no additives’ matters more than ‘organic’—take whole pumpkins or whole grains like soybeans and corn, for instance. I keep fully ripe, mature pumpkins to savour over time, and any corn I don’t eat fresh gets dried and stored. When I blend my daily pumpkin soy milk, I add a handful of those corn kernels. This not only improves the nutritional balance and digestibility but also adds a lovely fragrance and a thicker consistency.
We know that pumpkin skin packs more nutrients than the flesh, yet when it gets too mature it turns woody and inedible. Here, a heartfelt thank you to the high-speed blender that spins at over 30,000 revolutions per minute. Nowadays, we can simply toss everything in the machine and press a button—even the fibrous pulp and seeds—effortlessly transforming it all into a silky, smooth pumpkin soy milk.
Back in the agrarian age, this would have meant steaming first, then grinding and straining—a half-day’s toil that still wouldn’t yield the smooth texture we enjoy today, not to mention that the skin and seeds would inevitably end up in the waste basket. With a high-speed blender, however, it’s barely a lift of the hand.
Take the air-fried pumpkin mentioned at the start of this piece—another exclusive perk for modern times. I’ve built traditional clay ovens in both Yilan and Eren Valley (Yilan features a traditional European black oven, while Eren Valley has a rocket stove white oven). Wood-fired oven roasting is undeniably wonderful, but lighting the fire and getting the temperature right is a massive chore; just to enjoy a slice of roasted pumpkin, you’d be busy for hours. Switching to a conventional oven or air fryer is just as easy—though you’d need to lift a finger twice, to flip them halfway through.
Everyone knows brown rice is packed with nutrients, but its coarse texture has put many off. I once tried sprouted brown rice, which completely trumps white rice in mouthfeel, only it’s a bit of a faff to prepare. There’s now a rice cooker on the market specifically designed for “sprouted brown rice,” available online anywhere from a few thousand yuan for Japanese brands to a few hundred for domestic ones. I haven’t tried any, partly because I rarely eat rice anyway, and partly because a true foodie doesn’t mind a bit of extra effort if it leads to a good meal—in fact, they enjoy it.
When an era advances to the point where online shopping is seamless and a full suite of small kitchen appliances is at our fingertips, we can bridge the gap from field to table, neatly sidestepping the pitfalls of industrial production and globalised supply chains.
Finally, to answer a frequently asked question: if I don’t want to clutter the kitchen with gadgets, can I just buy semi-prepared foods and prepare them with a quick stir?
You can, but with one proviso: the ingredient list must be clean. Many of today’s instant “just add water” semi-prepared foods are loaded with additives. For instance, soya milk powders often contain added sugar, dextrin, and even trans fats. In those rich, creamy instant oatmeals, the oats are merely a figurehead; the real stars are maltodextrin (derived from corn starch), milk powders bursting with trans fats, and artificial flavourings. It’s all food science and harsh additives. The pitfalls of these instant foods run too deep, so I steer clear entirely.
In 2026, how will you kick off your own staple food revolution?
All photographs in this article were taken by the author
Editor: Xiaodan