Traditional markets, food circulation and supply, market transformation, and urban food ecologies.
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.
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.
Takeaways, fresh produce, snacks, gift boxes – readers detail everyday life wrapped in layer upon layer of plastic, and share ways to cut down on plastic, such as bringing their own containers and finding recycling points.
During those years of insurance back-office work in Shenzhen, Miantuan Jingjing’s table shifted from plastic takeout containers to an electric steamer and a bowl of chicken soup noodles — until her body pressed the resignation button for her.
One-pot fried rice, claypot rice, pressure-cooker meals done in fifteen minutes, weekend braised meat portioned out for the week, workplace canteens, community canteens, little neighbourhood eateries, wet markets… Skip takeaway, and working people actually have plenty of ways to eat.
At Yulin’s Longquan Green Vegetable Shop, several owners bound in an egalitarian partnership tend local ecological produce and the daily weigh-and-close routine. Professor Xu Leiqing’s Research Group 408 at Tongji University finds such a community space — most accessible, most frequently visited — is itself a therapeutic setting.
Li Ruijun, a wild-mushroom researcher, was poisoned by overeating broom blossoms last year. Even the termite mushroom, long thought to grow only on termite nests, has been trialled for cultivation — four people in ecology and natural history chat about the safety, authenticity and nature education of foraged food.
Marking the International Day for Biological Diversity, Foodthink invited four guests – including writer Ban Xia and ecologist Sun Shan – for a dialogue. At Kunming’s Zhuanxin Farmers’ Market, one stall carries 106 varieties of foraged wild greens; matsutake, however, has been listed as endangered.
From Jingyang in Shaanxi to Hainan, Harbin and Beijing, four Spring Festival tables each have their own flavour. Small-town dining is quietly drifting towards big-city standards — yet the rice noodles a Shaoyang local scoops into their own basin still hit the mark better than Dianping’s high-rated chains.
