Analysis of agricultural product prices, supply chains, corporate behavior, and industry trends.
Foodthink Says In January this year, a Beijing resident ordered fresh lilies via Hema, but mistakenly received toxic narcissus bulbs instead, leading to the hospitalisation of their 71-year-old mother and 12-year-old son after they consumed them. Addressing the mix-up, Hema explained that during the picking process, a packer had mistakenly…
Although we frequently talk about being “trapped in the algorithm,” it hardly slows algorithms from embedding themselves ever more deeply into daily life. But do internet creators, delivery couriers, e-commerce hosts, media professionals, and ride-hailing drivers—those who work with algorithms on a daily basis—truly lack their own perceptions and understanding…
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…
Foodthink Says This is the third field report from Foodthink’s visits to small-scale fishing communities in southern Thailand. The first two pieces explored how fishermen joined forces to oust commercial trawlers, form a national alliance, and actively engage in legislative and policy advocacy, and how ‘community conservation areas’ empowered locals…
In 1972, British scientist John Yudkin published a book titled Pure, White and Deadly. The protagonist of that book was sugar—pure, white sugar. The protagonist of this short piece is sugar too, but the sweet kind. Here, ‘sugar’ refers to sugar itself, sweets, and added sugars in food. On an…
When you step into a McDonald’s and take your place at the counter for your usual meal deal, can you sense it: behind that open kitchen, a highly orchestrated “production battle” is underway. In the lore of the fast-food empire, everything is standardised: a strict 90-second service window, fryers held…
On 7 February 2026, after a two-year hiatus, “Occupying the Collective Room” returned, successfully evolving into the Foodthink Annual Meeting. Over the course of 12 hours, we used selling vegetables as a hands-on way to immerse ourselves in the food and farming system. Eight Foodthink members traded their roles as…
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,…
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…
