How Can You Defend Your Rice Bowl Sovereignty Amid Food Safety Anxiety?
In the Yulin neighbourhood of Chengdu, Xia Lili, known as “Yi Guo Shi Tai”, is leading her dining companions in forging a close, meaningful bond with food, nature, and farmers, and in building a traceable, diverse ecological ingredient pantry. As time passes, this innovative vision of eating well has revealed the profound change it has wrought in her companions’ lives: what has been improved is not merely a group of people’s physical health, but their habits and mental well-being too. Through food, they have rebuilt a better relationship with themselves — surely one of the most direct and simple ways to make peace with oneself and resist the drift of self-alienation.
It is our hope that these stories from the small dining table in Yulin, Chengdu, will also help readers shed a sense of helplessness and find a direction for action.
I. Good Food Calls for Early to Bed, Early to Rise
In the past, they had often ordered heavy, oily, excessively salty takeaways to go with bland, coarse white rice (one of them described the rice in takeaway boxes as “as tasteless as chewing wax”), so that they had long lost any enthusiasm for eating, seeing it as nothing more than a mechanical act required to stay alive.
Perhaps “not wanting to eat” is the malaise of modern people. In an age of overwhelming material abundance and frantic pace, the body’s genuine hunger has long been lost, yet we still feel compelled to eat at the three mealtimes that society has collectively agreed upon for the sake of productivity. Of course, another major reason is simply that most takeaways use poor-quality rice, so the meals turn out dull and uninspiring.
If the food isn’t good, you simply don’t want to eat well. A half-hearted meal yields only a fleeting sense of fullness, so hunger — or rather craving — never truly goes away. On late nights, during overtime, or in moments of anxiety, we reach for mountains of snacks to satisfy a craving, relieve stress, or coax ourselves into feeling content, while constant grazing overtaxes and exhausts the digestive organs. In the long run, how can the body ever be well?
If your daily rhythms are in disarray, balanced nutrition is a pipedream. The small dining table exists as a modest support system for everyday life, its purpose being to help every participant live in a healthier way. So for each friend who joins the communal dining plan, I insist on two things above all: first, “collect your meal on time”; second, “eat well”.
Turning up on time to collect a meal is a considerable challenge for freelancers who stay up late and struggle to get out of bed. But the lure of a good meal shared among good friends, plus the gentle nudge that latecomers are “penalised” with washing-up, has given my dining companions the motivation to be up before eleven in the morning.
Every time I pack a meal into someone’s lunchbox, I can’t help saying a few words:
“When you sit down to eat, please don’t look at your phone, don’t play games, and don’t chat too much. If you can focus wholeheartedly on the food as it enters your mouth, chewing slowly and thoroughly, you can listen to your own body through those small, deliberate actions and respond to it properly, fostering a good dialogue with yourself.”
Eating well is the bare minimum of self-care.
II. Curing Anorexia Nervosa
A Xia is tall and slender; at 175 cm she looks all the more gaunt. Over the past few years, due to the upheaval of the wider environment, changes at work, and strained family relationships, she had developed a mild case of anorexia nervosa. When she heard I had started a small dining table, she came along as a dining companion with a “let’s give it a try” attitude.
I remember her second day of collecting a meal fell on a day when I had cooked stir-fried yardlong beans with minced beef, using beans from Hu Xuemei’s farm, with a handful of pickled yardlong beans tossed in. Chuchuzi, who was eating with her downstairs in the garden, quickly messaged the group to report: “A Xia finished both her lunch and her dinner portions.”
A month later, A Xia sent in her “report”, noting two remarkable changes since joining the small dining table: “First, I can get up on time and collect my meal punctually — not through sheer willpower, but through a genuine, spontaneous drive. Second, my appetite has improved enormously; I’ve put on two or three kilos. This wasn’t achieved through rigid diet plans and exercise regimes; I simply slipped, quite naturally, into a state of handling life with greater ease.”
“Handling life with greater ease” — what a beautiful way to put it. Who could have guessed that Yi Guo Shi Tai’s small dining table might hold therapeutic value for anorexia nervosa? I was overjoyed.
The nourishment good food brings to life varies from person to person. The same menu meets each companion’s needs differently: it helped Chuchuzi, who was trying to slim down, shed over five kilograms, while it helped A Xia, who needed to gain weight, put on a kilo or so. Of course, my own weight has long stayed stable within the range I consider most healthy.
The 600 yuan each person pays per month for food is made to stretch in my “skilful housekeeper’s” hands well beyond what the open market would offer, and the companions are more than happy to trust me blindly with every meal. When they heard I was taking a break over the summer holidays, a few of them let out a collective “wail”: “If you stop cooking (during the holidays), I just don’t know what I’m supposed to eat every day!”
III. The Rice Bowl Is Sacred, Inviolable
Since starting the small dining table, I have increased my sourcing volumes. Every month I send 5 kg of rice from Meishan via Chen Ying at Yujian Farm, brought along by the Chengdu Living Market, and I source millet, glutinous rice, brown rice, seeds, nuts, and pulses from fellow farmers, building the dining companions a traceable, diverse little granary.
On top of this granary, with Hu Xuemei’s vegetable packs added in, the dining companions’ everyday nutritional intake is well secured.
These dining companions had previously been people who craved meat and felt they needed it in their diets. But the small dining table’s meals centre on natural plant-based wholefoods, and they all embraced the change with pleasure. The fact that they have gone such a long time without any longing for meat has led them to reflect on how their former eating habits were formed.
A person’s eating habits — their understanding of and judgment about food — are shaped in childhood, largely by the environment they grow up in. I feel deep empathy and understanding for A Xia’s anorexia, because my own parents, too, were fond of criticising me at the dinner table when I was little. That feeling of swallowing mouthful after mouthful with tears in your eyes — tinged with hurt or anger — was truly wretched. Throughout my teenage years, I was tormented by stomach aches, never realising that they were my suppressed emotions seeking an outlet.
Fortunately, children do grow up, and once they have learned the survival skills they need, they can find ways to distance themselves from parents who don’t know how to respect a child — who merely nag endlessly, or even drain energy from them.
Because I once gained sovereignty over my life through the ability to “cook for myself”, after having my son Lemao I wanted to share with him the lessons life had taught me, and I hoped that one day he too might gain “autonomy over his life” through “autonomy over his food”. So in raising him, the thing I devoted the most time to was getting to know food with him.
After he was weaned, I told Lemao what every single thing he ate was. When he was a little older, I let him sit in his high chair and watch me cook. When he grew more, I took him to the fresh-food market and on farm visits — he even volunteered on a few farms — and I involved him in growing vegetables, fruit, and rice on our own plot of land.
The “I Want to Know My Food” reading group was a community activity I launched in parallel with teaching him about food. In an environment where people learn together and encourage one another, Lemao gradually grew into someone who knows where food comes from and knows what he wants to eat, with a strong sense of personal autonomy about his rice bowl being sacred and inviolable.
Once, several families gathered for a meal at a restaurant. During the meal, an auntie with a habit of eagerly looking after the children was over-enthusiastic in serving them, showing a hint of a “need for control”. Lemao clearly declined the meatball she offered him. She did not back off but, out of sheer habit, pressed the meatball into his bowl regardless. Lemao was furious in that moment: “Eating together (with everyone) is supposed to be a joyful thing, but being forced to eat something makes the whole act of eating NOT. ENJOY. ABLE!”
At the time the atmosphere grew awkward for a moment, leaving the auntie rather unable to save face. But I believe Lemao did nothing wrong, and through his actions he showed every child present: resistance to oppression starts at the table.
I am glad to see a child defend his food autonomy, and I hope more people will learn to discern the true meaning behind their food. After starting the small dining table, I shared relevant books with the dining companions in the group chat, encouraging them to find time to read about food so they could better understand why our meals centre on natural plant-based wholefoods, and why we need to know who grows our food and how it is produced.
Some dining companions have also asked why we don’t include more meat dishes. My answer is: if we can find meat that is both suitable and safe — a fellow farmer’s black pigs free-raised in the mountain valleys of Gansu, for instance, or pigs raised on a trusted farm’s own homegrown grain — we can occasionally buy a little for a taste.
With a limited budget and safety as our priority, this cook also has pragmatic alternatives: matching the vegetable dishes and, from time to time, picking up fresh spareribs, shredded pork, or minced meat from a familiar, reputable brand’s stall at the market to prepare a small meat dish as a supplement. The flavour of pigs kept in fenced pens on commercial feed is of course very different from that of mountain-roaming or village-raised pigs, but an occasional, modest serving as a dietary supplement and a change of palate is not without merit.
The point is that everyone must, through the act of “eating along” at the small dining table, become more proactive in learning about food, more attuned to their own bodies, and more clear about their needs — so that through the simple act of “eating well” they can hold the rice bowl firmly in their own hands, achieving the most fundamental form of self-care.
Editing: Xu Youyou