Urban food life, consumption behavior, and food culture.
Foodthink and Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market serve six consecutive days of “New Year recipes” – Day 2 to Day 7 – six home-style dishes of meat, vegetables and soup made from farming friends’ home-grown ingredients, so every good taste on the New Year table has an honest origin.
Eight Foodthink colleagues worked a 12-hour non-stop shift at Jishi—from veg identification and stock intake to live-stream shopping to communal dish-washing after the lamb soup screening—and encountered the unseen labour and carbon behind cold-chain energy consumption and an annual lease.
Drying sweet potato starch, steaming rice cakes, brewing red yeast rice wine, preparing winter bamboo shoots — Songyang’s New Year’s Eve dinner takes all winter, on Braid Granny at the market, nearly thirty years of Sister Zhuhua’s cakes, forest ranger Xu Yeyin’s wine vats, and the Grandpa Li couple.
Extreme weather upends farmers’ planting rhythms, the food-delivery wars compress a meal into a 30-minute order, and imported meat reaches the highland pastoral areas directly – Foodthink’s 2025 field records hold on to the traces of the land and its labourers.
Three Foodthink colleagues left their screens for Jishi, the ecological greengrocer in Sanyuanqiao — stacking stock, sorting produce, negotiating with customers over switching to another farm’s tomatoes — and in concrete physical labour rediscovered a tangible feel for life.
Saturday 7 February: eight Foodthink members take over Jishi, the community veg shop at Sanyuanqiao, swapping writing for veg selling. Join us in person or online for a year-end report, food and agriculture sharing session, Chinese New Year live shopping, and a film screening with lamb soup dinner.
Forty thousand delivery riders faced 700,000 active peers; the platforms raised per-order prices and simply defused the strike. Lacking employment contracts and strike protections, riders continue to take risks in a cycle of ever-shrinking algorithmic delivery deadlines.
At Guangzhou’s Harvest Festival, Foodthink had nearly a hundred readers relay-write eight climate fiction (cli-fi) stories from article titles, screen a documentary on imported beef and lamb hitting the Qinghai pastoral area, and discuss fields and dining tables under extreme weather with fellow growers and documentary filmmakers.
Readers from Beijing, Tokyo, Guangzhou, Chiang Mai and beyond share their everyday lives with the market: hidden-gem stalls, grocery-buying tips, the warmth of exchanges with stallholders—and—squeezed by supermarkets and e-commerce—where the market goes from here.
Former JD 7Fresh warehouse picker He Siqi spent 31 days in the warehouse: 9 minutes per order, 30 fen per item, 30,000 steps a day, supervisors shouting at any moment, and even on your period, no escape from the freezer.
