In 2006, on the banks of the Jinsha River, six ethnicities in Chezhu village celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival together. Their mooncakes had no filling; the wheat, rapeseed oil, eggs and maltose were all homegrown—”Everything but the iron pot is homegrown.”
An Anhui family travelled far into the Hunan countryside to open a mooncake factory. The child grew up beside the conveyor belt through summer holidays, until the factory shut, the fields all became sheds, and the bicycle on the river embankment rode ever further away.
Director Liu Taifeng of Another Day Full of Hope says riders’ “zero-cost onboarding” is really just debt for equipment and rent upfront; engineers under KPIs dare not question the system; restaurant owners must pad reviews — all strata are bound by the same algorithmic logic.
Weekly supply at Xiaoliushu Farm, Shunyi, has dropped from 200 boxes to 40; at Kongkonggu Farm, Pinggu, aubergines and tomatoes were nearly all lost. Autumn sowing is delayed by almost a month, and national wholesale prices are up 40%.
Jinzi grows heirloom yellow garden peas using biodynamic farming on mountains above 3,000 metres in Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture. Shipping lasts only about two weeks a year; this year, three jin of pods finally reached the dining buddies’ table.
Foodthink chats with director Liu Taifeng and producer Zhu Tong about their in-depth research into delivery riders before filming, and about riders and programmers being equally trapped in the system – and how to find our footing when faced with platforms.
Nichole, 55, spent a decade turning her Texas yards into a jungle of food and herbs without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. She and Yunnanese Zhang Yiqing — a cross-generational pair — bonded over refusing the American suburban lawn before Nichole moved to rural Pennsylvania to practise permaculture on larger land.
From saccharin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to genetically modified seeds, Monsanto kept its profits and left the pollution to society for a century. Sun Yat-sen University’s Xu Zhun, Zhejiang University’s Zhou Mujun and others discuss The Seed Empire: who sets the rules, and who pays?
Apollo Go in Wuhan leaves drivers with nothing but remote fire-fighting; Bianlifeng locks store managers’ experience outside the algorithm; Meituan’s system turns the time riders save by running red lights into new standards — power is accelerating toward the platforms.
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
