I loved cooking — I’d say I was fairly good at it — and I was always keen on having friends round for dinner, preparing a whole table of dishes for them myself. After I left my job, I had plenty of time on my hands. Every day I’d…

1         Who’s doing gig work?   When Zhang Dandan, a professor at Peking University, said that ‘flexibility itself is a benefit,’ I was deep in the remote forests of the Greater Khingan Range, struggling forward with a group of gig workers picking pinecones. Their job was…

  Foodthink Says In the box-office hit <em>Ox Come</em>, Ox Come and Bao La are close friends who grow up side by side. But deep in the Taihang Mountains, in the habitat of the Chinese leopard, the relationship between leopards, cattle and people is far more complex. Thanks to the…

  Food safety news has once again dominated trending searches, with a blogger reporting that someone was found dipping Chinese cabbage in formaldehyde. On 22 August, the People’s Government of Kangbao County, Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province, issued a public notice stating that, following preliminary verification, the reports were confirmed: a buyer…

  Foodthink Says In *Welcome to the Dragon Restaurant*, Shen Teng plays a Chinese chef who rallies a dozen or so kids into a makeshift troupe, setting up a grand feast in a foreign land. Stir-fried, deep-fried, braised, slow-simmered in a cast-iron pot — you can almost smell the wok…

  In an era of rapid change, wet markets have found themselves in a difficult position for various reasons. Some have inevitably faced closure, while others have been preserved for the convenience they offer to locals. Wenzhou’s Shuangjingtou Wet Market is one such holdout. This naturally raises a question: in…

  I went back to my hometown in southern Hebei this past May to see how straw incorporation is actually playing out. When I explained why I was there, the local farmers would first pause, wearing that familiar “what’s there really to talk about?” look. Whether you call it confusion…

  My hometown of Liquan, a county in Shaanxi province, is best known for its apples. There was even a saying that “to see China”s apples, look to Shaanxi; to see Shaanxi’s apples, look to Liquan’. In the past, nearly every farming household in the area grew apples, supplementing them…

1       To Farm, First Chop the Straw   “The village said they couldn’t handle it! Just chop it into the field!”   Zhao Hai (pseudonym) recalled that following last autumn’s harvest, he had told the village officials he hoped for straw removal (off-field processing), which involved hiring…