Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
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…
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…
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…
Foodthink Says On 12 January, based on research conducted across several regions, Foodthink published an original article 《What’s Driving Down the Standards of “High-Standard Farmland”?》, which attracted comments from practitioners and researchers across the agriculture and engineering sectors nationwide. They shared their observations on the construction and operation of high-standard…
In November 2025, Zhao Lishun, a farmer from Meishan, watched the village’s rice paddies go unharvested, shaking his head in dismay. Yet these fields no longer belonged to him, nor to the villagers, but to the “bosses”—large-scale land contractors from out of town who had acquired the plots through land…
I. Nine Years: Change and Continuity On 5 January 2026, upon reading a report in the Farmers Daily titled “Hebei’s Rural Heating Crisis Must Not Be Delayed Further”, I felt a sudden jolt, as if abruptly transported back nine years. I am from Hebei. 2016 was the first freezing winter…
Foodthink Says Milk, often heralded as a symbol of purity and nature, is in fact highly conducive to microbial growth. Its propensity to spoil and deteriorate quickly meant it was originally ill-suited for long-term storage or long-distance transport. Initially, milk was indeed merely a localised food, yet within today’s modern…
