Final Letter of 2025: Foodthink’s Harvest Celebration ‘Creative Antics’ Showcase

by Posted on

This is Foodthink’s final post of 2025. Surprise! It’s not a wrap-up! (Truth be told, the year-end review hasn’t quite been ‘dug out’ yet, so please try again later…)

In the meantime, why not take a look at the antics we got up to at the recent Guangdong Harvest Festival!

◉ Foodthink editor Yuyang ‘casting a spell’. Photography | Yan Qiange

Collaborative Climate Sci-Fi Stories

Thanks to the annual Harvest Festival, we spent a Winter Solstice in Guangzhou that was as scorching as the Summer Solstice—Santa would have had to ride a camel to get here. One wonders if this freakishly hot winter day could be attributed to climate change.

Over the course of three days, we took hundreds of titles from Foodthink’s articles on land, farmers, food, and climate from the past year and stirred them together with a table full of Cantonese delicacies, turning them into fragments of stories. Nearly a hundred guests, young and old, randomly drew word cards and played a ‘story-chain’ game to stitch together eight climate sci-fi novels that would put any AI to shame.

In these stories, you’ll encounter the boundless culinary imagination of the people of Guangdong—

  • The ultimate solution to save humanity happens to be—potatoes, corn, beef offal, ginger milk curd, and pulled rice rolls?
  • The Ice… Ice Age arrives, and the whole world transforms into one giant Yum Cha spread!
  • Ginger milk curd finally has something for its CV: “In the struggle to recruit me, companies went so far as to hurl char siu bao at one another… the char siu bao did nothing to deserve this…”
  • Pulled rice rolls dominate the skies, and the people of Guangdong transform into cosmic free-range chickens…
These eight sci-fi stories adhered to a single creative principle: even at the end of the world, the food must be delicious. This perfectly echoed this year’s Harvest Festival theme: A thousand ways to craft a meal.

◉ For more information about the Harvest Festival, please click the link in the poster.

Through each of your literary contributions, we have been given a chance to journey from ‘words’ back to ‘reality’, reimagining the bond between humanity, the land, the climate, and our food 🍚

Of course, such wonderful creations deserve a life beyond the Harvest Festival. We have compiled all eight stories and brought them online, transcending pen and paper to achieve a kind of ‘cyber-immortality’. Furthermore, to more vividly capture the spirit of the Cantonese, we have prepared an AIGC version, using ChatGPT to bring these abstractions to life visually.

👇 Swipe to explore the AI’s imagination

*Friendly reminder: Please ensure you have eaten before viewing

Poems Between Meals: Cantonese Edition

Beyond the climate sci-fi relay, the introverts among us took a moment to blend Foodthink’s article titles with local Cantonese flair to create ‘Poems Between Meals’. Only in Guangzhou… could one find collage poetry this delicious! In the spaces between the words, we catch the scent of the earth, taste the delights of the street, and share our reflections.

◉ View: Savour the whimsy and poetry of Guangzhou~

is Not Served Today

◉ A space for sharing foods that are now hard to find, and the stories behind them.

As familiar foods and flavours vanish, our relationship with the land, the climate, and our memories shifts quietly. Which foods were once staples, but are now nearly impossible to find?

Green tangerines, White Rabbit sweets; Grandma’s pies, the kway teow from downstairs; strange mushroom roasted persimmons… What did they taste like? And why did they disappear?

We hope to join you in documenting these vanishing foods, preserving these tales of flavour and fond memories. We invite you to share your own ‘Sold Out Today’ in the comments~

◉ Guess what ‘food’ this is?

It was a joy to meet so many Foodthink readers from the Greater Bay Area at the Harvest Festival—

Those who travelled from Huizhou, Foshan, Shunde, and Hong Kong,

And our veteran readers who have been with Foodthink since 2017.

Thank you for coming to see us in person; we have finally stepped out from behind the screens and into reality! We are so grateful to those of you who have accompanied us year after year from the other side of the screen~ We have also made many new friends, and we hope that in the days to come, Foodthink can continue to accompany you in eating well and living healthily.

Forum Retrospective

Foodthink brought the documentary *Whose Table, Whose Pasture*—supported by the 2024 Lianhe Creative Plan—to Guangzhou for the first time to meet our readers. The director travelled deep into the pastoral regions surrounding Qinghai Lake, documenting the impact of the influx of imported frozen beef and mutton into the local market. The film illustrates how the price advantage of imported meat has disrupted the local industry, confronting us with a harsh reality: within the globalised meat chain, who benefits from the low prices, and who pays the price?

◉ Poster for *Whose Table, Whose Pasture*

On the afternoon of the final day, we invited rural documentary filmmakers Zhao Yushun and Yuan Zhenzhen—whose work focuses on agriculture, rural areas, and farmers—to share their observations of the devastation they witnessed while visiting the countryside of Guangdong and Guangxi this year. Fenglian, a local deeply rooted in Guangzhou, spoke about the challenges that the city’s ‘extra-long summers’ have posed for crop cultivation over the last two years. When agriculture and rural communities are hit by extreme weather, how does this ripple through to our cities and our dinner tables? Readers and consumers in attendance joined the discussion on extreme weather, confronting the reality and searching for solutions.

◉ View: Zhao Yushun’s presentation; Liao Fenglian’s presentation; Q&A with readers. Photography | Mingchun

At the event, our photographer captured many moments of warmth and joy.

◉ We hope this brings a smile to your face too. Photography | Yan Qiange
For those unfamiliar with the Harvest Festival (Fengnianqing), put simply, it is China’s largest offline gathering for sustainable food and agriculture; born in Guangzhou, its influence now extends far beyond the Guangdong and Guangxi regions. Now in its ninth year, the festival has evolved from a simple farmers’ market into a multidisciplinary celebration blending ecological agriculture, art, literature, and social issues. The Harvest Festival remains the vital link connecting the countryside to the city, and producers to consumers.

As the only non-local organiser of the Harvest Festival, Foodthink travels to Guangzhou every year to reconnect with our farming partners and readers in the south. We have grown here, and here we have witnessed this: when producers and consumers support one another, the act of eating gains a sense of dignity and meaning that goes beyond the mere struggle of making a living.

Bonus Content

Looking at the images below, can you recognise any of the small-scale ecological farmers that Foodthink has featured or collaborated with?

◉ Some of these are a bit too obvious! 😂 Photography | Yan Qiange
Happy wrap-up for 2025! May we all, after our wildest imaginings, still find the strength to put them into practice.

We shall meet again in Guangzhou in 2026 to celebrate another harvest.

“Eat well, drink well, and may all your wishes be fulfilled”

Curation: Li Ye

Editing: Kerry, Tianle

Illustrations: ZX, Li Ye

Published by Foodthink