Using “Eating” to Draw City Dwellers into Human Warmth and Nature | One-Pot Abbess’s Little Table
Editor’s Note
An alternative to eating takeaway alone, the Little Table offers a healthier, more eco-friendly, and warmer form of shared dining. In the current economic downturn, tablemates pool their purchases from farming partners, and producers and consumers find common ground through the Little Table, supporting one another for mutual benefit. Xia Lili hopes that through the Little Table she can lead more people in building a more resilient support system for everyday life.
This miniature community canteen is the sum total of everything Xia Lili has gathered in the first half of her life about getting to know food, and it is also one of the ways she participates in social development while searching for a better path forward.
Because she can conjure all sorts of delightful dishes from a single pot, friends also call her the “One-Pot Abbess”. She is also a nature education practitioner, as well as a researcher and practitioner of community placemaking. She has loved cooking since childhood and has always been passionate about nurturing sustainable relationships between people, food, and nature. Another of her roles is that of a writer: she has contributed the “Solar Term Table” column for Foodthink, and she will now evolve this series into “One-Pot Abbess’s Little Table”, centring on the tablemates, cooks, farming partners, and food around the table… one vivid story unfolding after another.
This is the first instalment of the “One-Pot Abbess’s Little Table” column, in which the One-Pot Abbess recounts the past and present of the Little Table by interweaving timelines, slowly unfolding her deeper reflections on the project.
Living in the city, the shifts in daylight are barely noticeable, and time feels a little hazy. Thankfully, I now live in the Yulin–Fangcao neighbourhood of Chengdu, an older residential area at the junction of the First and Second Ring Roads on the city’s south side – a hub for community placemaking and urban regeneration – where I can sense the turning of the solar terms by observing the plants around me and attending the monthly Chengdu Life Market.
Since setting up the Little Table, I visit the market every month to buy produce for my tablemates – not only can I catch up with my farming partners, but I also save on delivery charges and reduce the waste of resources and labour that courier services create.
This year the rain in Chengdu has been most considerate, falling from time to time since Grain Rain, letting crops grow well and fill out properly, and nudging those ripening fruits to leave their trees. The loquat tree beside the wall of Yulin Kindergarten has drunk its fill these past few days, and the fruits have begun splitting open and dropping to the ground.
I think to myself: if only the kindergarten could make good use of these loquat trees, bringing the children to observe, pick, and learn to make jam or toss a salad all year round – wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Nature education must begin with what is close at hand; labour education must connect to everyday life. This is my conviction, and my practice.
I. “Growing Up in Nature and Human Warmth”
I truly feel fortunate. In an era when agriculture is dominated by industrial shortcuts and harsh additives, my child gets to grow up eating food grown by these small-scale ecological farmers using environmentally friendly methods. We have visited many farms and at some have even exchanged labour for food and accommodation, spending his first decade learning about my farming partners’ work and daily lives.
Ten years have turned him into a child who loves food, has an open palate, and knows exactly what he wants to eat. At restaurants he picks dishes he doesn’t get to try often; when we shop at the market he asks where the produce comes from; and even when we occasionally pop into a supermarket for snacks, he checks the ingredient list on the labels.
Growing up surrounded by nature and human warmth – this has been my wish ever since I was pregnant with him. Now it has become reality. I am grateful to the internet for connecting me with this community of farming partners and organisations that care about food, to the farming partners’ steadfast cultivation of their land, and to the partners who have walked the path of co-learning in ecological agriculture alongside us, sharpening and supporting one another all the way.
These golden loquats look so tempting – they remind me of the Sushi Courtyard where I once lived in Mingyue Village. There, we lived as Hayakawa Yumi wrote in A Life of Farming and Eating: “Not revolving around our own timetable, but living days centred on the time of plants.” We spent a stretch of days living as neighbours with the loquat trees.
In the second year of being loquat-tree neighbours in that courtyard, when the harvest was bountiful, I led a few village children in cooking a whole loquat feast in my kitchen.
I remember that day – the children arrived at the courtyard at the appointed time, first picking fruit from the trees with a fruit picker, then washing the harvest in a basin, peeling and stoning the fruit, and tearing the flesh into pieces. We layered the flesh with rock sugar in jars and sealed them. These candied loquats have followed me ever since, from that original courtyard to the Earth Kitchen at the Lemao family home. They are a memento with a special purpose and a vividly coloured decoration, so they have always held centre stage on the kitchen’s prep counter.
I never quite bring myself to use them up. I only add a small amount now and then to a pot of braised pork for extra flavour.
Several years have passed since then. Some of the children who took part in that day’s activity have since been accepted to senior high school or university and left Mingyue Village to see the wider world, but the laughter they left in that courtyard as children, along with the courtyard’s loquats, lives forever in that small glass jar in the kitchen.
That same year, we planted mint and lemon balm in the courtyard. I would simply pluck a few leaves and scatter them over loquat flesh we had peeled and stoned with the children, adding a handful of freshly picked raspberries or mulberries, sometimes a few nuts too – a gentle toss and there it was: a summer fruit salad that both grown-ups and children loved.
Time moves on, and children grow. Now we live a hundred kilometres apart on most days, and I have lost much of my enthusiasm for making these little treats. But now that the Little Table is up and running, what I think about each weekday is what to cook for my tablemates.
II. The Seed of an Idea: A Choice Beyond Takeaway
I hope that food, as a medium, can help more parents shift the focus of their children’s education towards everyday life – getting to know the local environment through vegetables and fruit, and passing on local culture in every bowl of congee and every bite of rice. I am delighted that these sessions have been warmly received by many urban families, with several rounds held successively at weekends and during the winter and summer holidays.
The grown-ups and children who joined each session loved wandering the wet market, and loved eating at the Chengdu Life Market office on North Yulin Street just as much. The vegetables grown by our farming partners in relatively clean soil, using ecological methods, always tasted richer than the conventional produce at the market – and naturally, they were more nutritious too. Even children who normally needed constant coaxing to eat at home would often lick their lips and ask for seconds.
Every time I see those children’s faces light up with joy and contentment, I feel I ought to do a little more work – help more children understand where the food they eat every day comes from, how important cooking in tune with the seasons really is, why there are so many fermented foods in this region, and what benefits come for our bodies and the environment when we buy more vegetables from our farming partners ……
Alongside running the Nature Writing Studio, I helped operate a bookshop near where I live. For a period, I needed to be on shift at the shop two days a week. During those shifts, I noticed that the shop owners and staff on the street where the bookshop sat had takeaway for almost every lunch and dinner.
I worried a little about their health, and I also felt that all the takeaway packaging generated so much waste – it simply was not sustainable.
After I started bringing home-cooked meals for the bookshop staff a few times, the idea for a Little Table was born. The bookshop’s storeroom had once been a private kitchen, so the pots, pans, and dishes were already there. I only needed to invite nearby shop owners to pool money for buying vegetables from our farming partners, while I did the meal planning and cooking. People who previously had no choice but to order takeaway could then enjoy clean, healthy home-cooked meals, and my farming partners could shift a little more of their produce. As for me, I could use the Little Table to connect producers with consumers, hone my cooking skills along the way, and save on living costs by swapping labour for meals.
Say it, do it. I immediately began assembling the Little Table in my mind. Whose rice and whole grains should I buy? Who should I order a weekly vegetable box from? The market set up its stalls once a month, so I could stock up on staples, whole grains, and root vegetables there, but how would I source leafy greens and squashes for the other days? And should I share this latest experiment in everyday life on my WeChat public account ……
Yet plans rarely keep pace with change. After the Spring Festival, the bookshop adjusted its operations. I no longer needed to work shifts, and the storeroom was about to be sublet. The Little Table on Caihong Street was, for the moment, nothing more than an idea that had made a full circuit through my mind.
That path was closed, but I hadn’t given up yet.
III. The “Tablemates” Assemble
The previous Spring Festival, I had been invited to the mountains near Ya’an to provide consultancy for a nature camp, where I met Miss Jiang. During a break between sessions, everyone stretched and moved in the sunshine, and the conversation turned to health. Miss Jiang demonstrated how to practise diaphragmatic breathing correctly, which made a lasting impression on me.
Miss Jiang had run a café, worked at a nature camp, and explored somatic movement and other therapeutic practices. She had a solid understanding of ecological agriculture, wholesome food, and the healing power of a regular routine. When we met again and the Little Table came up in conversation, every idea I shared resonated perfectly with her. She was delighted and immediately said she wanted to be my housemate.
As housemates, buying and eating together, we would strengthen our collaboration and deepen our friendship, save on gas, electricity, and water – but more importantly, the Little Table could rescue her from the daily dilemma of never knowing what to eat, freeing up more time to explore the things she was passionate about.
With Miss Jiang on board, I went downstairs to introduce her as the new neighbour to the two siblings who ran the plant shop. I told them the Little Table had launched and invited them to join. The siblings, who had been struggling to sort out their meals, were pleased with the proposal. After I explained why the Little Table existed, we settled on a suitable time each day to collect meals and agreed on how much each person should contribute each month to cover the costs. And just like that, the Little Table version 1.0 went live in trial.
Now, I want to use the practice of eating together to guide my tablemates in getting to know their food. Once again, centring on the radius of daily life, I am bringing the people around me together to build a community of co-learning. Through the Little Table, I hope to find new pathways that connect producers with consumers, and I look forward, with my farming partners and tablemates by my side, to discovering fresh ways to express a life well lived.
