Urban food life, consumption behavior, and food culture.
In 2023, I arrived in Melbourne, the specialty coffee capital, on an Australian Working Holiday Visa to work and study. However, due to my lack of experience and the sheer number of young workers in the city, I found I couldn’t make ends meet on part-time café shifts alone. I…
I. Plastic as the Framework of Modern Life Could a modern person get by without plastic? When an American female author prepared to take on the challenge of avoiding plastic for a full day, she soon realised: modern life is virtually impossible without it. Within ten seconds of waking up,…
I am someone who succumbed to pressure; I couldn’t keep playing this game of racing between skyscrapers. Now, I write my story in the hope that as a “failed player” still in flight, I can identify from those past “failures” the things that truly made me feel lonely and depressed,…
In the first decade of the 2000s, repeated food safety scandals prompted a growing number of Chinese consumers to seek out better farming practices and produce. Across the country, a new generation of farmers began pioneering organic agriculture. One such pioneer is this episode’s guest, Cao Xiaohong. In 2008, concerned…
The delivery market clash between JD.com and Meituan is in full swing, with the most conspicuous battleground being the strategic tug-of-war over riders’ social security. On 19 February 2025, JD.com was the first to announce it would cover the full social insurance and housing fund contributions for its full-time riders.…
Foodthink’s Take In the previous edition of our “Eat Well” column, dozens of Foodthink readers shared their “moments they wanted to avoid takeout”. Many expressed their frustration; although there are times they are tired of takeout, the frantic pace of work, a lack of culinary skill, or poor kitchen facilities…
Qingming Festival is a time for ancestral worship and tomb-sweeping. This year it falls on4 April, which just happens to be404. This naturally brings to mind articles that have been marked404 not found. Last year, Foodthink saw several of its articles ‘disappear’ on its WeChat Official Account—the highest number to…
This episode welcomes the social enterprise Muyunpo to Food Talk. We’ll hear how they have partnered with villagers to explore fairer and more sustainable production methods—one that protects the natural environment while bringing the village’s finest produce to wider markets, ultimately securing better returns for farmers. Xiaojin County in Aba…
Foodthink Says “Humanity’s unsustainable production and consumption patterns are pushing the planet to the brink of disaster,” is the opening line used by the United Nations to introduce Zero Waste Day, observed annually on 30 March. For urban residents in China, the single-use plastic waste accumulating in daily life is…
Foodthink Says Since its launch in 2003, Taiwan’s *Qingyao’er* bimonthly magazine has chronicled sustainable food and agriculture practices across the Straits and internationally, inspiring and shaping a generation of practitioners in the field. How did the story of *Qingyao’er* begin? How has a publication that pays no contributors and runs…
