Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
In Yulin, Chengdu, Xia Lili has set up a community small dining table with traceable, farm-direct ingredients, giving a group long reliant on takeaway a reason to pick up their rice bowls again. Some have regained their appetite; others, their motivation to get up on time.
A Nature Communications serum study of 5,696 people across 15 provinces found 74 environmental hazardous chemicals at high detection rates, closely linked to 12 chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity; China’s blood residue levels of organochlorine pesticides and PFASs are significantly higher than in other countries.
In Japanese, “soba” and “beside me” are homophones — housewarming noodles for neighbours, toshikoshi soba on Ōmisoka, enduring customs. In Nagano, the heart of soba country, from Jōmon-era famine porridge to Edo peddlers’ cries, this bowl’s journey hides in the everyday.
Xia Lili cooks for her meal companions in Yulin, Chengdu – a bowl of pa pa cai boiled in plain water, no oil, no salt, ten grains cooked into one pot of rice – bringing farmer friends, bodies and the land back to the same table.
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.
In Yulin, Chengdu, Xia Lili gathered two plant-shop siblings and Miss Jiang – soon her housemate – as tablemates, pooling produce from farming partners and cooking together instead of daily takeaway. She has been setting this table from the loquat courtyard in Mingyue Village all the way to Yulin’s streetside.
Since 2018, Inner Mongolia has pushed its “Dairy Revitalisation” policy, yet small dairy-food producers in Senggendalai Town are trapped: standardised upgrades cost hundreds of thousands of yuan, far beyond herders’ per capita annual income of just over 20,000, while natural fermentation’s traditional flavours fade in mechanised mass production.
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.
The marketing rhetoric of premium supermarkets, the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavour wheel, legislation shaped by lobbying from large agribusinesses—quality is no natural concept, and consumers and smallholder farmers remain ever on the margins of this chain of power.
