I. Farm Machinery Memories of the Post-2000s Generation As far back as I can remember, my family has been farming, cultivating mainly wheat and rice. During school holidays, I used to tail the harvester with my friends, picking up stray rice ears trailing behind it. Harvesters were scarce back then;…
Friends were divided on whether Guan Qi was an introvert or an extrovert. Several people had asked him directly, only to receive a different answer each time. After he passed away, as we gathered together, we realised this was a truth that could never be pinned down. Whenever I recall…
On 4 April last year, Foodthink published a “collection of deleted articles”. Since then, each time a piece was taken down, the team would console themselves with an inside joke: “We’ve already got another ‘404ed 404’ for next year.” But the 404s over the past two years aren’t entirely the…
Foodthink Says As the Qingming Festival approaches, whether for travel or tomb-sweeping, many will head to the countryside for a few meals of “farmhouse food”. This year’s Spring Festival was no different for the author of this piece. This account of dining during a return to the village for the…
How did an organisation focused on insect ecology start caring about farmers’ livelihoods? And how did an organisation focused on livelihoods end up writing a “Song of the Fly“? How did a man from Shanxi become a “male Women’s Director” in a Yunnan village? Why is a top genetic engineering…
At around 7 a.m., 65-year-old Sister Zhen arrives at the sugarcane field. She clips her heavily scratched smartphone to a cane stalk, connects to her neighbour’s Wi-Fi, and opens Douyin. Under her breath, she runs through the steps: “Tap the plus sign, swipe left, go live.” The camera is pointed…
Having left the small village where every household practised fermentation for so long, and drifted too long in the uncertainties of city life, I had lost a measure of my own vitality. This is something I have only recently come to realise. For years, fermentation was nothing more than a…
Last year, standing by a field edge in Yunnan’s hills, I saw rice for the first time sprouting directly from level soil, with no flooded paddies or irrigation ditches in sight. For many, rice is inextricably linked to flooded paddies. Yet it can just as easily be cultivated on dry,…
Foodthink Says On 17 January 2026, Mercosur (including nations such as Argentina and Brazil, hereafter referred to as Mercosur) and the European Union formally signed a free trade agreement in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. Prior to the signing, the pact had already sparked widespread protests among European farmers. They…
Foodthink Says In 1948, the central government decided to import tractors from the Soviet Union to bring the vast, untamed lands of Beidahuang under cultivation. At the same time, to train agricultural machinery operators, a tractor driver training programme was launched at the Beian Reclamation Area in Heilongjiang. Eighteen-year-old Liang…