I. Spreading White to Dry, Hanging Gold to Cure; Fragrant Wine and Curling Smoke From the Start of Winter, amidst the mountain ranges of south-west Zhejiang and across the Songgu Plain, the people of Songyang have already begun preparing for the New Year’s Eve feast. In these valley settlements, cradled…
Looking back at 2025, what news about food and agriculture left the deepest impression on you? Was it the struggle to harvest crops amidst the relentless rains of North China, the delivery platform wars, the heated debates over pre-prepared meals that nearly sparked violence, or…? Over the past year, Foodthink,…
I. Debunking the Myth of Western Modern Agriculture There is a familiar paradigm of social progress: humanity advanced from hunting and gathering and slash-and-burn cultivation to settled agriculture, and then from intensive smallholder farming to large-scale industrialised agriculture. But did history truly unfold in this manner? Is large-scale monoculture really…
As I set pen to paper, it is the second day of the twelfth lunar month of the Yisi Snake Year, coinciding with the Major Cold solar term and the fourth day of the Fourth Nine. The old saying goes, “During the Third and Fourth Nines, the ice is thick…
What happens when three people accustomed to long hours at a desk decide to sell vegetables at a community organic produce shop near Sanyuanqiao in Beijing? Will they manage? Staring endlessly at screens, data, and back-to-back meetings, have you ever wondered: what is the point of all this? In this…
Haymaking, or harvesting grass, is a term used exclusively in pastoral regions. In early August 2025, I returned to a traditional Kazakh pastoral village in south-eastern Altay, arriving just as the herders were beginning their hay harvest. Since the television series My Altay captured the public imagination two years ago,…
A note to all departments: Foodthink’s “Jishi Takeover 3.0” and Annual Gathering Special Project is now officially underway! On Saturday 7 February, from 10:00 to 22:00, we will take over Jishi, the community outlet for the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market at Sanyuanqiao. This is not only the source of ingredients…
“Is there truly nothing else left to eat?” “Snowpiercer was far too prescient!” Just yesterday, after seeing a journalist visit an American cockroach farm and drink a cup of crispy cockroach coffee, netizens voiced this piercing question. Picture this: alongside the American cockroach, countless yellow mealworms and black soldier fly…
During the Spring Festival at the start of 2025, the topic of our family dinner was AI, specifically DeepSeek, which had just blown up. The younger generation couldn’t stop talking about it. I felt a bit detached, much as I had when ChatGPT first launched a couple of years prior.…
What happens when a “expert” with twenty years’ experience researching agricultural policy decides to roll up their trousers and personally cultivate 2.6 mu (roughly 0.42 acres) of paddy rice? Chen Jingjing, an agriculture university graduate with a long-standing focus on rural development, took what he calls an “unconventional” step this…
