Podcast episodes, transcripts, interviews, and related content.
Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme sent five young people to Lüwo Farm in Jingyang, Shaanxi, where their days went far beyond planting vegetables and pulling weeds — raising seedlings, driving a tractor, working on the biscuit production line, attending biodynamic farming classes.
Once young teachers who had both worked in nature education, Antian and Sanqi spent six months interning at Yinlin Village’s ecological farm in Guangdong – planting, organising events, running the café. Now they are determined to return to the countryside and build their own farm.
Director Liu Taifeng of Another Day Full of Hope says riders’ “zero-cost onboarding” is really just debt for equipment and rent upfront; engineers under KPIs dare not question the system; restaurant owners must pad reviews — all strata are bound by the same algorithmic logic.
Foodthink chats with director Liu Taifeng and producer Zhu Tong about their in-depth research into delivery riders before filming, and about riders and programmers being equally trapped in the system – and how to find our footing when faced with platforms.
During the summer of 2021, Yuyang spent four months as an Ele.me dedicated rider in Zhongguancun, navigating between the delivery station, merchants and customers, contending with order dispatch, complaints and attendance tracking – making a decision almost every minute and second.
Tanker trucks loaded edible soybean oil without cleaning; even public attention can hardly break industry collusion. New mothers, facing pesticide-treated fruit and baby formula ingredient lists, feel even more at a loss. Keeping food sources within a knowable, controllable range has become the most realistic response.
From volunteer teaching in Shaanxi to promoting ecological agriculture training in Guangxi, Huang Guoliang (Lao Liu) co-founded the Y.C. James Yen Rural Reconstruction Academy and the Little Donkey Community Farm, advocating coexistence and mutual learning between ecological and conventional agriculture rather than irreconcilability.
With over a decade in the villages – growing rice, raising chickens, brewing green plum wine, running rural tourism – Huang Yajun of Conghua’s Deep Cultivation centre offers, after multiple setbacks, a practitioner’s response to the academic judgement that rural work runs counter to modernisation.
After the sequel premiered in spring 2024, four Foodthink editors gathered to rewatch Food, Inc., discussing whether the industrialised farming, seed monopolies and corporate grip on the food supply it exposes have worsened or improved in the United States—and whether China is facing the same problems.
Department of Biological Sciences, Southwest University graduate, former white-collar worker, Tang Liang returned to Jintang County, Chengdu, in 2013, sustaining eleven on 30 mu. Per-capita monthly income barely reaches ¥2,000, yet each family member has found their place; the village gained free courses and benches for the elderly.
