Introductions, activities, progress updates, participant records, and reviews related to the Lianhe Programme.
In 1946, Shen Dongyan in Malaysia sent a qiaopi simply to have his mother buy a braised goose for ancestral rites. In the Chaoshan region, braised goose is the offering of the highest grade on the offering table; this reverence has continued from the Nanyang to today.
Foodthink screens four films about food and labour back-to-back at Tuanjiehu this June — from food-delivery riders to rice farmers, pastoralists and fermentation artisans. Each screening is followed by an in-person conversation with directors, protagonists and activists, and preceded by a farmers’ market.
On 26 May at 19:00, Foodthink screens a field-research documentary at Toku Gallery, Qinhuai District, tracing how imported frozen beef and mutton flooding the market slashed buying prices for herders around Qinghai Lake, leaving them struggling to repay loans. Afterward, Tianle joins the audience for a discussion.
Foodthink will screen the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture in Ürümqi, documenting the livelihood impact on herders around Qinghai Lake after imported frozen meat flooded the market. After the screening, local Xinjiang organisations and guest speakers will discuss pastoral and herder issues.
Foodthink’s sixth round of the Lianhe Programme small action grants is open to farmers, cooperatives, community self-organisations and others. Priority goes to local projects helping smallholders on the front lines of climate change. ¥5,000–¥30,000 in funding plus communications resources; applications close on 17 May.
The second Lianhe Creative Programme received 197 applications, with 20 projects ultimately selected. Topics range from Southeast Asian fruit supply chains and mountain villages where the Sichuan pepper boom has ebbed, to digital fish ponds, wild boar conflicts in Tibetan regions, and farmers’ livelihoods under climate risk.
Foodthink ends two weeks of silence as Grain Rain arrives, reintroducing itself to readers: a food and agriculture platform founded in 2017, focused on smallholder livelihoods and the conditions of food and farming workers. This year it turns its focus to women farmers, herders and climate resilience.
Guanqi of the Farmer Seed Network died unexpectedly on a work trip in Qinghai. Foodthink’s friends set down who he was: the group’s “study representative”, a craft beer lover, an unsung hero of seed conservation — and the friend who made sure no one was ever alone.
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.
