In 2024, we received many books from the fields of food, agriculture, ecology, sustainability and culture, each recording the complexity and possibilities of our world in its own form.
From sprinting delivery workers to modern-day grassland herders, from the food politics behind foie gras to the many efforts to protect seed diversity, from the industrial traps of ultra-processed foods to the insights on natural symbiosis offered by mycelial networks… each book leads us from blind faith towards questioning, from a narrow corner of understanding to the vast world, inviting us to witness the contradictions and hopes woven through the relationships between people, land, food and nature.
We hope these books will bring us reflections, inspiration or imagination about possibilities in the new year, helping us rediscover nature and ourselves through the concrete act of reading.
Digital Dash: Food Delivery Riders and the Labour Order of the Platform Economy
Author: Chen Long
Shanghai People’s Publishing House | Century Wenjing
Published November 2024
Transitional Labour: Food Delivery Riders in the Platform Economy
Author: Sun Ping
East China Normal University Press | Mint Experiment
Published July 2024
Delivery-riding films, collective incidents, scholarly works and even tabloid gossip together formed the landscape of the food delivery debate in 2024. These two books present the lives of delivery riders more thoroughly from a bottom-up perspective, offering general readers a chance to understand the field comprehensively and leaving an archive for future memory.
The riders who weave through our streets and alleys are themselves the most visible face of the platform economy. On the one hand, readers’ attention to these ordinary people around them triggered widespread empathy among ‘wage workers’ for delivery riders; on the other hand, riders are everywhere, the most accessible natural field site for journalists and researchers alike. Since 2020, a series of public concerns around food delivery has therefore focused on riders as a central subject.
But at present, there is “much thunder, little rain”—genuine change has yet to seem possible. Beyond “speaking up for workers at the bottom”, we must also consider how to view the platform economy from more diverse perspectives and advance deeper public discussion. We should still pay tribute to authors who persist in giving voice, but in the current space of public opinion, perhaps more can yet be done.
——Wang Hao (Foodthink editor)
Contested Taste: Foie Gras and the Politics of Food
Author: [US] Michaela DeSoucey
Translated by: Zhang Santian
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press | “Food Can Speak” translation series
Published August 2024
This book argues that the history of foie gras is considerably complex: it is not merely a food, but one carrying multiple layers of cultural, political and moral significance. DeSoucey points out that foie gras, as a traditional French delicacy, is revered as a gourmet treasure, yet is simultaneously criticised and even attacked by animal welfare organisations because of the controversial practice of gavage. Drawing on cultural sociology and organisational theory, she examines how foie gras has become a litmus test for moral and political controversy, and the divergent outcomes these controversies have produced. Treating foie gras as a “cultural object”, she traces a comprehensive arc from its historical origins to the modern industry and its contested moral standing. Her deep dissection of foie gras’s history and cultural meaning reveals its complexity across different cultural and political contexts, and her further analysis of the political and cultural conflicts behind food raises a thought-provoking question: is what we eat truly up to us?
——Zhu Yan (Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences)
Seed Revolution
Authors: [Italy] Marco Boscolo; [Italy] Elisabetta Tola
Translated by: Ding Yingying
Oriental Publishing House | World New Agriculture Series
Published January 2024
Through two authors’ fieldwork around the world, this book presents cases of farmers practising in situ conservation of traditional seeds on their own land. It reveals how people safeguard cultural and ecological diversity by preserving heritage seeds, addressing the problems that industrial agriculture has wrought in areas such as food security, rural development and biodiversity. The book also examines the application of the “population” concept in breeding innovation, reminding us that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is not limited to natural biological diversity but can also drive the sustainable transformation of seed systems and agriculture. This perspective offers new directions for ecological conservation and agricultural transition.
——Guan Qi (Head of the Eastern Office, Farmer’s Seed Network)
Grassland Modernity
Author: Shu Ni
Intellectual Property Publishing House
Published August 2024
The dual-responsibility reform for grassland and livestock, which began in the 1980s, profoundly transformed Inner Mongolia’s pastoral landscape: household-by-household wire-mesh fencing, motorised wells and corrals replaced the grasslands once shared by all. If The Wisdom of Nomadic Herding summarises a body of traditional knowledge now fading, then in this new book Shu Ni is more intent on conveying the little-known face of the grasslands: just as pasturelands adapt to new property rights and management systems, nomadic culture too is searching for its own modernity under the impact of the outside world. Herding horses in off-road vehicles, building cold-storage facilities through herders’ cooperatives, running study-tour camps for visitors—beyond passive modernisation, herders are learning to harness the market and working to give their cultural heritage the value it truly deserves. For the new generation of herders, this is perhaps an essential lesson.
——Xiaozhu (Foodthink editor)
Monsanto’s GMO Wars: Three GM Seed Lawsuits in Brazil and India
Author: [US] Karine E. Peschard
Translated by: Li Tianjiao
China Science and Technology Press | Zhongke Academy
Published June 2024
‘Whoever controls the seeds controls the world.’ Ever since genetically modified crops emerged, Monsanto, armed with intellectual property law and breeder’s rights, swiftly extended its reach into Global South nations. By analysing three lawsuits filed in Brazil and India over GM seed royalties to which Monsanto was subjected, Peschard exposes the company’s stratagems and open designs, while also tracing the evolution of both countries’ seed-law frameworks amid multi-party contestation. Although the outcomes of all three lawsuits fell short of expectations, legal activism did foster multi-party alliances and reminds us: an institution that better safeguards smallholder farmers’ seed rights is not only possible but necessary.
——Ze’en (Foodthink editor)
Ultra-Processed People: Why We Are All Eating Too Much
Author: [UK] Chris van Tulleken
Translated by: Xin Mei
China Science and Technology Press | Zhongke Academy
Published August 2024
This book explains very clearly the fundamental nature of food since the late 1930s. It notes that in the UK, roughly 75% of the population gets 60% of their calorie intake from denatured ultra-processed foods (UPFs). This dietary pattern is not confined to the UK; similar trends are appearing in other countries as well. Drawing on extensive research, the book shows that the overconsumption of ultra-processed foods is closely linked to a range of health problems. It urges us to choose natural whole foods wherever possible, to support diverse local produce, to pay attention to the supply chains behind our food, and to understand the profound environmental and health impacts of industrialised agriculture.
——Li Hui (Founder, Xihuoli Sustainable Living Space)
The Charm of Naxi Villages: A Pictorial Record of the Naxi Mosuo People
Mosuo Sages: An Oral History of the Dongba
Guardians of the Dongba: A Cultural Chronicle of the Mosuo People
Authors: Song Yiqing / Zhuang Yufen / Sun Qingzhong / Yang Duoji Zhashi / Shenggen
In the hidden realm of the Mosuo people at the border of Sichuan and Yunnan, more than 400 Dongba ceremonies are still held every year. Dongba priests and martial practitioners walk the villages, guarding the land and waters. The people pour their hearts into heaven and earth, treat all living things with kindness, and live in harmony, unity and quiet contentment among the mountains. The vast and systematic Dongba culture embodies the region’s folk customs and traditions, while the ancient, pristine Dongba script is the world’s only living pictographic script. The Dongba Culture Trilogy brings together a decade of fieldwork and three years of photography by veteran humanities scholars and renowned documentary photographers in the Naxi valleys, recording—through cultural chronicles, pictorial records and oral histories—the folk customs and cultural memories of ancient Naxi and Mosuo villages in a race against time.
——Han Xiao (Editor, CITIC Press)
Entanglements: Life among Fungi
Author: [UK] Merlin Sheldrake
Translated by: Luo Dinghao
Beijing United Publishing Co. | Houlang Science
Published November 2024
When most people think of fungi, they picture mushrooms—but fungi are far more than what ends up on a plate. ‘Fungi are everywhere, yet easily overlooked.’ From tiny Penicillium mould and yeast to the honey fungus that grows vast underground networks, fungi nourish or kill plants and animals, survive in radiation, outer space or inside insects, break down rocks, produce medicines, cause hallucinations, sustain the relationship between plants and soil, and influence the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere. These life forms, distinct from both plants and animals, exist in ways that are mysterious, powerful and too often ignored, offering us prompts as we explore the path towards symbiosis with the natural world. By delving into fungi, this book teaches us to break apart our preconceptions about evolution, ecology, individuality, intelligence and life itself. The more we understand fungi, the more deeply we understand the planet beneath our feet and ourselves.
——ZX (Foodthink)
The Seed and the Soil: The Rise and Fall of Monsanto and the Future of Our Food
Author: [US] Bart J. Elmendorf
Translated by: Huang Zexuan
SDX Joint Publishing Company | Yali (imprint)
Published April 2024
This book is the heartfelt work of an environmental historian, accessible and easy to read. By situating Monsanto within the broader arc of capitalist industrial history, it traces the rise of a multinational giant and helps us understand how science and technology penetrate everyday life—and what problems they pose to the human environment. The author shuns the conspiracy-theory narrative and does not rest on archival research alone: he has produced not just a corporate history or an environmental history, but a vivid portrait of the lives of the many people drawn into this giant’s orbit. Although the Monsanto corporation has met its end, the technologies it unleashed have not. How we should understand the social nature of technology is one of the many meaningful questions this book raises—especially when it slips beyond the control of ordinary people and becomes something inscrutable, held in the hands of specialists alone.
——Xu Zhun (Professor, Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University)
Beyond these titles, 2024 also brought us many new books exploring food and agriculture and related fields from a range of angles and formats. We would like to thank the authors, publishers and readers who have supported and cared for the food and agriculture space over the past year. Your documentation, reflection and critique; your attention, curation and discernment; your curiosity, understanding and questioning—all of this allows the nourishment of knowledge to flow back more abundantly to the land and nature on which we all depend.
– New Year Comment Giveaway –
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Finally, what food, agriculture or sustainability books have you come across this year that you would recommend?
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Produced by: Foodthink
Edited by: Ze’en, ZX
