Eight years after moving from Xiji, Ningxia to Shenzhen, Ma Lan, a Hui girl, has almost no halal options beyond Lanzhou lamian restaurants. Cooking and eating alone, all she really wants is a dining companion to share meals with.
Renting an Airbnb in Sydney to ring in the New Year, a family found avian influenza pushing eggs to nearly four yuan each, Chinese noodles at eighty a bowl, and coffee nearly doubled. Only back in China did she realise how precious that home-cooked bowl was.
Soya beans, mung beans and adzuki beans all originate from China. Following the Silk Road and the footsteps of migrants, they took root in miso, fermented bean curd and Southeast Asian kitchens, weaving together a history of the dining table that spans continents.
Foodthink Founding Editor Chang Tianle and Sijia, host of 100 Ways of Living, chat about ecological agriculture, supporting local farmers, and how office workers can still cook proper meals without ordering a takeaway.
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.
Foodthink farmer-foodie Kouzi cooks a pot of over a dozen kinds of beans and grains as porridge: soak 48 hours to encourage sprouting and degrade phytic acid, pre-cook beans and grains in stages to remove purines, freeze a day to form resistant starch—one bowl, nutrition and delight.
In the Jino Mountain rainforest, Jinuo guide Saoqie forages greens, scoops fish and roasts food wrapped in banana leaves — a meal once the Jinuo people’s daily livelihood. This rainforest is no “untouched paradise”: since 24 trekking companies arrived, Jinuo lives keep shifting between rubber and tourists.
Six months on, cook Xia Lili’s community kitchen in Yulin, Chengdu has knit her meal companions, pot by pot. A burst pipe led a neighbour to take them all in; a new arrival wrote their song. This all-female crew’s table is now a pillar in each life.
The eating disorders art exhibition at Gallery No. 600, Shanghai Mental Health Centre, unites patient-created and professional works. Curator Zhang Qinwen, a six-year survivor, founded the ED Healer mutual-support community, using science communication and exhibitions to build public awareness of this illness.
In 2006, on the banks of the Jinsha River, six ethnicities in Chezhu village celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival together. Their mooncakes had no filling; the wheat, rapeseed oil, eggs and maltose were all homegrown—”Everything but the iron pot is homegrown.”