Urban food life, consumption behavior, and food culture.
Shu Shiwei, who spent a decade in the countryside, founded Green Sprout to document Taichung fruit growers’ stories of transformation. Each issue is printed in a thousand copies, most given away free; the magazine has sustained over 100 issues on reader sponsorship and unpaid contributions.
The National Health Commission has launched a three-year “Weight Management Year” initiative, yet modern obesity is a systemic issue shaped by food industry, takeaway and pseudo-health foods. Foodthink charts a scientific path from dietary structure through processed-food traps to natural dietary principles, beyond ‘dieting equals weight loss’ mindset.
Work vibe so heavy you can’t stomach a takeaway box; sweet soup 3–5 yuan dearer than dine-in; a rider’s hand slashed in the snow. Dozens of readers wrote down specific moments of pushing back against takeaway – from ready meals to plastic packaging, all pointing to a proper meal.
A cup of Americano squeezed to six yuan, a meat pancake to ten — traffic has become the platform’s weapon to force shops into loss-making price concessions. Pinhaofan’s cheapness is no technological innovation, but a cost borne jointly by shop owners and riders.
Renting an Airbnb in Sydney to ring in the New Year, a family found avian influenza pushing eggs to nearly four yuan each, Chinese noodles at eighty a bowl, and coffee nearly doubled. Only back in China did she realise how precious that home-cooked bowl was.
Among the more than ten ecological farms Foodthink visited, new-generation farmers bring wildly diverse professional backgrounds. Above the shared bottom line of no chemicals, from five mu of intensive cultivation to a garden-style life, every farm is the embodiment of its owner’s ideals.
Meituan, a major generator of food-delivery plastic waste, has begun funding environmental organisations working on plastic reduction. Spanning fundraising ethics to corporate PR tactics, Shan Shui Conservation Center co-founder Sun Shan and freelance environmental writer Ma Tianjie ask whether public-interest organisations can hold their independence against polluter funding.
In a small ranching town in Texas, Zhang Yiqing buys eggs directly from free-range backyard hens and small organic farmers, sidestepping supermarket purchase limits and price hikes. She believes decentralised local food systems are the real solution to the egg shortages intensive farming keeps causing.
In 2024, riders’ sudden deaths, the exposé of “ghost takeaway”, collective protests, two new books and two films pushed the plight of workers under delivery-platform algorithms into public discourse. Foodthink reviews the year’s key stories and films about platforms and food.
From the labour order of delivery riders to the insights into symbiosis offered by mycelial networks, more than ten new books published in 2024 across food, agriculture and ecology record the hope intertwined with contradictions between people, land and nature.
