Podcast episodes, transcripts, interviews, and related content.
A family tends ten mu of land, grows salad greens, makes ferments – with the support of Canada’s Fair Food Farms incubator, Sun Shan built Chi Garden from scratch and, through the joy of growing, left behind the helplessness and exhaustion of years in public-interest work.
Shu Meng, who holds a PhD in sociology from Cornell University, and three hosts discuss the structural factors behind America’s unhealthy diet – from shopping distances and supersized packaging to comparisons with wet markets – and whether farmers’ markets and small-producer grocery shops can offer another path for dietary transformation.
Jishi, Beijing Organic Farmers Market’s community greengrocer at Fenghuanghui, East Third Ring—ten years sourcing traceable produce from ecological smallholders. After its third renovation, market head Xiaoyun Sheng and designer Kang Zhen discuss balancing ecological ideals with limited budget in CBD, rebuilding ties between people, community and nature.
Foodthink hosts chat with food culture researcher Sun Lin about “legal, but unnecessary” food additives: soy sauce made without a single soya bean, a slice of toast containing over a dozen additives, and whether the true cost of industry replacing slow fermentation has been clearly seen.
Former Beijing advertising worker Yu Jiangang and wife Mei Yuhui rear silkworms and reel silk in Zhenghebang Village, Tongxiang, tending the village’s last acre of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums. Their silk quilt brand Meiheyu passes on the craft — but the family farm now faces land and road development hurdles.
Miyun’s Feiniao yu Mingchong founder Yifang, Xiao Yunsheng of Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, host Xiao Jing – three mothers on what a farm can give children. A seed planted, a peach ripening naturally, uncertainty of “relying on the heavens for a living”: a sense of reality no desk offers.
Ma Yanwei, a Beijing Normal University ecology master’s graduate, has grown muskmelons in the Tengger Desert for eight years. Lei Tiantian, who left Shanghai, interned on the farm. The three chat under a tree in Alxa about drought, running the farm, and how one melon improves the desert.
Lei Tiantian, who fled Shanghai to intern at Zhiliangtian Farm, chats with founder Ma Yanwei in the Tengger Desert: growing pumpkins, picking shacong (sand leek)—what kind of life do this generation of ‘new farmers’ actually lead?
Jeremy Clarkson ploughs with a Lamborghini tractor, herds sheep with drones, yet his annual net profit is just £144 – do the same pitfalls await farming in China? And how does the UK’s social support for agriculture compare with Chinese farmers’ circumstances?
Through nearly 100 articles, 13 podcast episodes and more than 40 events, Foodthink recorded ordinary people’s food struggles during the pandemic and ecological smallholders’ climate adaptation practices, and sent its first cohort of young interns to 12 farms – leaving solid traces amid uncertainty.
