Food Safety Anxiety: How to Defend Your Sovereignty Over Your Plate
In the Yulin community of Chengdu, ‘The One-Pot Nun’ Xia Lilli is leading a group of meal companions to forge deep connections with farmers through food and nature, creating a traceable and diversified library of ecological ingredients. Over time, her innovative approach to ‘eating well’ has revealed the profound changes it has brought to her companions. It has improved not only their physical health but also their daily habits and mental well-being—food has allowed them to rebuild a healthier relationship with themselves, offering a direct and simple way to reconcile with the self and resist alienation.
I hope these stories from the ‘small dinner tables’ of Yulin, Chengdu, can help others shake off their sense of helplessness and find a path toward action.
I. Good Meals Inspire Early Nights and Early Rises
In the past, they often ordered takeaways heavy in oil and salt, paired with coarse white rice (one person described the rice in those takeaway boxes as “tasting like cardboard”). Consequently, they had lost all enthusiasm for eating, viewing it as a mere mechanical act of consumption necessary to sustain life.
Perhaps “not wanting to eat” is a common ailment of modern life. Amidst extreme material abundance and a frantic pace of living, the innate sense of hunger has long been lost, yet we are forced to eat according to mealtimes dictated by the requirements of social production. Of course, a primary reason is that most rice used in takeaways is of poor quality, making the resulting meal unappetising.
When the food is poor, there is no desire to eat well. When one eats poorly, the sense of fullness achieved is fleeting, leading to a constant feeling of hunger (or more accurately, a craving for taste). During all-nighters, overtime, or periods of anxiety, this leads to snacking to satisfy cravings, relieve stress, or seek self-comfort. Frequent eating, in turn, causes the digestive organs to overreact and become exhausted. Over time, how can the body remain healthy?
If one’s routine is erratic, a balanced diet is out of the question. As a tiny life-support system, the purpose of the communal table is to help every participant live more healthily. Therefore, I emphasise two things to every friend joining the shared meal plan: first, “collect your meals on time”, and second, “eat well”.
Collecting meals on time is a huge challenge for freelancers who stay up late and struggle to wake up. However, the temptation of delicious food and the company of friends, combined with the “punishment” of having to wash the pots for those who arrive late, has given the dining companions the motivation to get out of bed before 11 am.
Every time I pack the food into their lunchboxes, I nag them a little:
“While you are eating, put away your phone, don’t play games, and don’t chat too much. If you can focus entirely on the food entering your mouth, chewing slowly and thoroughly, you can listen to your body through those mindful actions, respond appropriately, and create a positive interaction with your physical self.”
Eating well is the most basic form of self-care.
II. Curing anorexia
Axia has a tall, slender build; at 1.75 metres, she appeared almost skeletal. Over the last few years, due to drastic changes in the general environment, job instability, and strained family relationships, she developed mild anorexia. Upon hearing about my communal table, she joined as a dining companion, hoping to give it a try.
I remember her second day collecting food; I had made Hu Xuemei’s cowpeas with minced beef, adding some pickled cowpeas. Chu Chu, who was eating with her in the garden downstairs, hurried to report to the group chat: “Axia has eaten both her lunch and dinner portions!”
A month later, Axia sent her “report”, noting two significant changes since joining the communal table: “First, I no longer need to rely on sheer willpower; instead, I have a spontaneous motivation to wake up and collect my meals on time. Second, my appetite has grown, and I’ve gained two or three kilograms. This wasn’t the result of forced dieting or an exercise regime, but a natural transition into a state where I feel more at ease with life.”
“More at ease with life”—what a wonderful phrase. I was delighted to find that Nun One-Pot’s communal table could even be therapeutic for anorexia.
The nourishment that good food brings to life varies from person to person. The same combination of dishes meets the different needs of the dining companions; it helped Chu Chu, who is trying to lose weight, shed over five kilograms, while helping Axia, who needed to gain weight, put on two or three.
As a “clever housekeeper”, I manage the monthly food fee of 600 yuan from each person to achieve a purchasing power far beyond the actual market rate; the girls are more than happy to simply follow my lead and eat. When they heard I would be taking a break for the summer holidays, some even wailed: “If you stop cooking during the break, I won’t even know what to eat every day.”
III. The rice bowl is sacred and inviolable
Since starting the Little Dining Table, I have increased my procurement. Each month, via the Chengdu Life Market, I ask Chen Ying from Encounter Farm to bring 10 jin of rice from Meishan, and source millet, glutinous rice, brown rice, seeds, nuts, and legumes from other farmer friends, creating a traceable and diverse little granary for my dining companions.
With this granary as a foundation, supplemented by Hu Xuemei’s vegetable packs, the basic nutritional needs of the dining companions are secured.
These dining companions originally had habits of liking or needing meat. However, the Little Dining Table focuses on a natural plant-based diet, which they have all happily accepted. Moreover, after a long time without craving meat, they have begun to reflect on how their previous eating habits were formed.
Eating habits, as well as our perception, understanding, and judgment of food, are largely shaped by our environment during childhood. I feel deep sympathy and understanding for Axia’s anorexia because my own parents also liked to criticise me at the dinner table when I was a child. That feeling of swallowing food bite by bite, tearfully, out of grievance or anger, is truly unpleasant. Throughout my adolescence, I was often plagued by stomach pains, unaware that it was repressed emotion seeking a way to be released.
Fortunately, children eventually grow up. Once they have learned and mastered the necessary survival skills, they can find ways to distance themselves from parents who do not respect children, who do nothing but nag, or who even feed on their children’s energy.
Because I once gained autonomy over my life through ‘knowing how to cook’, now that I have my own child, Le Mao, I want to share the experience I have gained from life with him. I hope that one day he, too, can achieve ‘autonomy of life’ through ‘autonomy of food’. Therefore, I spend the most time in his upbringing introducing him to food.
After weaning, I tell Le Mao exactly what every single thing he eats is. As he grew slightly older, I would let him sit in his high chair and watch me cook. As he grew even more, I took him to visit markets and farms; we even worked at several farms, and I let him participate in planting vegetables, fruit, and rice in our own plot.
The ‘I Want to Know My Food’ reading group was a community activity started simultaneously with the process of introducing him to food. In an environment of collective learning and mutual encouragement, Le Mao gradually grew into someone who knows where food comes from and what he wants to eat; he also developed a strong sense of autonomy, believing that ‘the rice bowl is sacred and inviolable’.
Once, several families gathered at a restaurant. One lady there had a habit of enthusiastically looking after children; she was overly proactive in serving food to the kids, even exhibiting a certain ‘desire for control’. Le Mao explicitly refused her meatball. She didn’t stop, but rather, following her own momentum, forced the meatball into his bowl. In that moment, Le Mao was furious: ‘Eating together is supposed to be a happy thing, but if you are forced to eat something, it makes the act of eating un-hap-py!’
The scene became awkward for a moment, leaving the lady feeling a bit exposed. But I believe Le Mao was not wrong; through his actions, he told all the children present: resist oppression, starting from the dinner table.
I am glad to see my child knows how to defend his food autonomy, and I hope more people learn to discern the true meaning behind our food. After starting the Little Dining Table, I recommended relevant books to the group, giving them time to read about food. This helps them better understand why our diet should be primarily plant-based, and why it is important to know who produced our food and how.
Some dining companions once asked why there wasn’t more meat. My answer was that if there is trustworthy meat—such as black pigs free-roaming in the valleys of Gansu, or pigs raised on a familiar farm with home-grown grain—we can occasionally buy a little to try.
Within a limited budget and while ensuring safety as much as possible, the cook also has a practical workaround: based on the plant-based pairings, she occasionally buys fresh ribs, shredded meat, or minced meat from trusted brand stalls in the market to provide some meat as a supplement. Pigs raised in pens on feed naturally taste very different from mountain or farm-raised pigs, but consuming them occasionally and in small amounts as a dietary supplement or for variety is perfectly acceptable.
The point is that through the process of ‘following’ the Little Dining Table, everyone should become more proactive in knowing their food, understanding their own bodies, and clarifying their own needs. Only then can they, through the act of ‘eating well’, hold the rice bowl firmly in their own hands and achieve self-care at the most fundamental level.
Editor: Xu Youyou