Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
In the salt-scarce, damp highlands, the Miao ancestors who migrated south to Yunnan-Guizhou replaced salt with fermented sourness. From rice-water white sour soup to tomato-and-chilli red sour soup, it has seeped into daily meals and festival rituals across all Guizhou’s peoples.
In Villain Valley, Fujian, Grandma Kouzi builds this permaculture system through layered planting, duck-shelter symbiosis and perennial herbaceous crops — plant once, eat for a lifetime, and the primary task of humans is simply to harvest.
Kouzi, a farmer at the Valley of Villains, accompanied her parents through their final four and forty-four days in the ICU. She has since signed an advance directive, refusing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a mechanical ventilator and oesophageal tube feeding – fighting for a natural farewell not blocked by instruments.
On the edge of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, farmer Louis spent 16 years transforming a banana monoculture into an agroforestry “forest”; philosophy graduate Zhang Zhiwei, who laboured on African and Brazilian farms for nearly a year, now plans to bring this method back to Yunnan.
Living alone, young people scroll their phones while eating. Some feel it brings companionship, some grow emptier the more they watch, and others discover that sitting down to eat properly with someone close, or cooking a meal by hand, beats any “mealtime” video.
In Èrén Valley, Fujian, Farmer Kouzi has spent four years clearing wild land toward self-sufficiency, turning a gully once deemed unfit for human habitation into fields for growing and admiring. This year, the gardenias behind the house bloomed for the first time.
Ten-fen school-gate ice lollies, Ah Ma’s pig’s-trotter rings from the market, and mother-steamed táo guǒ – Zhang Fulan’s most solid childhood flavours in 1990s Jieyang, Chaoshan; after snack chains and food delivery reshaped a generation’s bodies, she returned to the stove to relearn those guǒ pǐn with her mother.
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.
Guanzhong’s old-variety muskmelon Baituwa, passed down for decades by farmers saving their own seed, has now retreated from city shelves under the pressure of large-scale cultivation and e-commerce sales, glimpsed only occasionally at rural markets.
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.
