Drying sweet potato starch, steaming rice cakes, brewing red yeast rice wine, preparing winter bamboo shoots — Songyang’s New Year’s Eve dinner takes all winter, on Braid Granny at the market, nearly thirty years of Sister Zhuhua’s cakes, forest ranger Xu Yeyin’s wine vats, and the Grandpa Li couple.
Extreme weather upends farmers’ planting rhythms, the food-delivery wars compress a meal into a 30-minute order, and imported meat reaches the highland pastoral areas directly – Foodthink’s 2025 field records hold on to the traces of the land and its labourers.
The large-scale monoculture of the Plantationocene has dismantled ecosystems and rural communities, yet the traditions of care in the Qimin Yaoshu and Xu Guangqi’s Nongzheng Quanshu suggest that “non-plantation” farming can still become imaginable once more.
Shandong native Kouzi’s sixth winter in rural Fujian: from rocket stove kang to old granary turned warm room, from radish soup to dried pumpkin, the south’s damp cold at last gives way to ease.
Three Foodthink colleagues left their screens for Jishi, the ecological greengrocer in Sanyuanqiao — stacking stock, sorting produce, negotiating with customers over switching to another farm’s tomatoes — and in concrete physical labour rediscovered a tangible feel for life.
Forty years after dual contracting of grassland and livestock, J village in Qinghe County still has only 92 grassland certificates while pastoral households exceed 200. They sow lucerne on their hay meadows, pay irrigation charges, and buy fodder from farming areas at twice their own harvest before winter.
Saturday 7 February: eight Foodthink members take over Jishi, the community veg shop at Sanyuanqiao, swapping writing for veg selling. Join us in person or online for a year-end report, food and agriculture sharing session, Chinese New Year live shopping, and a film screening with lamb soup dinner.
Ÿnsect, the European insect-protein unicorn that raised USD 625 million, has been wound up by a French court. A UK Government-commissioned life cycle assessment also shows insect meal’s carbon emissions far exceed soybean meal’s — the capital narrative of “eating bugs equals eco-friendliness” is being punctured by full-chain data.
Farmer Kou Yanding of Villain Valley, Fujian, has sued Baidu at the Beijing Internet Court, alleging its AI fabricated an extortion charge against her — the first documented AI defamation case in China.
Chen Jingjing, a 20-year researcher of rural construction, worked a paddy for the first time this year in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou—no herbicide, sun-drying. Rice cost over 30 yuan a jin, and he also hit a hard wall woven from land rent, hired labour and the division of labour.
