Podcast episodes, transcripts, interviews, and related content.
China’s dependence on pollinating insects is twice the global average, and drone spraying is leaving migratory beekeepers at a disadvantage – who gives notice, who yields, who pays for the bees’ pollination services: a new strategic contest in the fields.
Yu Jiangang (Yugang), a Tongxiang silkworm farmer who returned to the land fourteen years ago, recounts drone pesticide drift damage poisoning mulberry silkworms on a large scale, the squeezing of the rice–mulberry–silkworm symbiotic tradition, and his attempt to rent 15 mu of rice paddies to save them.
Three mothers chat from the childhood trauma of eating nothing but dumpling wrappers to the sweet burden of an adolescent child who eats “three dinners a day”, unpacking the generational memory, invisible emotional labour and self-identity behind “eating”.
After four years “infiltrating” e-commerce livestream teams and nine months merchandising, Duan Shichang found rural livestream rooms hiding a tug-of-war between ‘new-generation farmers’ and the algorithm: the grandmother selling salted duck eggs might be an actor, suffering is commodified, and “algorithm lore” is their path to breaking through.
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.
Leaving the public sector, Zuo Zhi, a post-1985 generation member, dove into Yunnan’s villages, teaching farmers to use fewer pesticides and grow heritage rice varieties, trading a cup of liquor for their trust, and building a bridge between government and the fields for climate-friendly agriculture.
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.
Jiang Ke, who served seven months as a Shift Manager at McDonald’s, discovered that the precise order-fulfilment system is both advanced and fragile—behind the beeps and countdowns lies the staff’s real experience of “human-machine unity” in a cramped kitchen.
Three Foodthink colleagues left their screens for Jishi, the ecological greengrocer in Sanyuanqiao — stacking stock, sorting produce, negotiating with customers over switching to another farm’s tomatoes — and in concrete physical labour rediscovered a tangible feel for life.
Chen Jingjing, a 20-year researcher of rural construction, worked a paddy for the first time this year in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou—no herbicide, sun-drying. Rice cost over 30 yuan a jin, and he also hit a hard wall woven from land rent, hired labour and the division of labour.
