Dietary health, food safety, nutrition, and food culture.
Working part-time as a Picker at Xiaoxiang Supermarket: three minutes per order, pay based on “effective working hours”, and continuous sprinting between the sub-zero freezer and tall shelving units. Mis-picks and omitted items are inevitable structural problems under this speed regime.
The year grandmother opened the shop, customers still brought empty drink bottles to fill with loose soy sauce; now mother hands regulars their usual brand from memory, while the daughter far off in Wuxi returns each Chinese New Year for a few days as the stall’s “second-in-command”.
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.
This Chinese New Year, villagers in Wutong Village, Weiyuan, carried bamboo baskets to market before dawn, steamed rice over a wood-fired stove, and spent five hours on a dish of native crucian carp, pinching pea shoots for shao bai and meatball soup. Twenty rural days: humble ingredients, labour-intensive cooking.
Mother wept before the sauerkraut crock in the abandoned courtyard of the family home in Heilongjiang. Back in Beijing, this generation dug out Fermented Food and pickled their first-ever crock of sauerkraut.
Three heavy mealside-drama users range from hundred-rewatched classics to stress-relief short series, probing whether screen companionship truly eases loneliness – or leaves us swallowing the original flavour of food in a haze of digital compensation.
Oyster sauce, crisps and salad dressings all hide sugar – eighty per cent of supermarket shelves can’t do without it. Excess fructose converts to fat in the liver, driving the fatty liver → diabetes → heart disease chain; children are steeped in sugar from an early age.
A small strip of clay by the courtyard wall of our Hangzhou studio: after seven batches of hot compost made from saved kitchen scraps and coffee grounds, the ground, hard as rammed earth, has loosened into black soil that opens with a single spade.
The last dish in Foodthink’s New Year recipe collection: Ujimqin sheep from Dulan’s family of Harigobi herders in East Ujimqin Banner, Inner Mongolia, raised through four-season transhumance—clear-simmered with salt alone until the meat is fall-apart tender.
Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market present the New Year Recipe Collection. New Year Day Six: Yiyi Farm’s Red sour soup – stir-fry the aromatics, simmer into a pot of Sour soup hotpot, meats and vegetables alike.
