Unfold the Folded Table with These Annual Keywords

How Did Imported “Fake Meat” End Up on the Tables of Qinghai–Tibet Pastoralists?

Too Expensive or Too Cheap? A Review of “Fake Meat Driving Out Real Meat”

Nearly Twenty Years of Investigative Reporting: How Did They Expose the Shadowy World of “Cattle Laundering” at Brazilian Meat Giants?

Brazilians Felling Forests – What’s That Got to Do with Us?

This Food Paradise Takes Up Half of Brazil’s Exported Beef Offal

As foreign foods flow in, old local varieties and flavours are disappearing. These varieties are not merely food – they are threads binding terroir, culture and family memory: White Rabbit Baby, Red Lip Glutinous, White Brow Bean – and if no one continues to grow them, they will vanish from the world.

Growing Vanishing Glutinous Rice on the Hills of Sichuan

The Chayote Shoot’s Breakthrough: Climate, Seeds and a County-Town Crop Boom

Why Has the Sweetness of Childhood Disappeared?

If No One Keeps Planting Them, They Will Vanish from the World Forever

Foraging for Wild Greens in the Netherlands: Closer to Plants – a Little Closer Still

Whether it is a fish from afar or meat from home, we have lived alongside the foods we eat most often for years, yet still cannot see their true face clearly. Can our understanding of food go beyond the level of consumption – reaching deeper into the places where it originates, to understand how the changes there shape our tables?

Two and a Half Years as an Agricultural Journalist, Yet I Still Cannot “See” Food

When an Anthropology Master’s Student Goes to Sell Meat at the Slaughterhouse

Has Salmon Really Become “Free”?

To understand food better, we actually need to start with local ingredients. For local food often grows beneath our feet, hides in mountain forests, ferments in our kitchens. They tell a different kind of “locality” – rootedness, handcraft, self-sufficiency, harmony with nature.

The Consecration “Ghee”: Turns Out to Be This Tibetan Fermented Delicacy

How Yunnan’s Wild Tomato Became Villains’ Valley Tomato Sauce | Sauce Artisan Kouzi

If Agriculture Is So Advanced, Why Do People Still Eat Wild Greens?

Mushroom Pavilion Chronicles: My Fermentation Work in Berlin

Another layer of meaning that food conveys through flavour is shared memory – taste forms an emotional bond between us and our hometown, our family, and our past.

– Food Talk –

In 2025, Foodthink’s podcast Food Talk published 14 new episodes. Over the past year, we have both asked how we can claim the right to “eat well” under the dominance of the mainstream food system, and examined the conflicts and risks inherent in that system itself.

Without question, pre-made meals have been the topic with the longest and widest-reaching public debate on food this year. Foodthink has been following the rise of pre-made meals for some time; as early as January last year, before the public clash between Luo Yonghao and Jia Guolong even erupted, we had already produced a podcast episode on the subject. Our guest, Doudou, went so far as to offer time-poor “beasts of burden” a healthier, safer set of pre-made meal recipes. Is the future truly the age of pre-made meals? Food Talk will keep following this story.

The pushback against pre-made meals at least shows that, deep down, Chinese people still harbour an expectation of healthy, home-cooked meals fragrant with wok hei. But will that expectation be destroyed the day pre-made meals become a byword for “cheap” and “convenient”? In truth, whether it is delivery, fresh grocery e-commerce or plastic packaging, it is all in service of an urban life defined by low cost and convenience – yet few people understand the hidden costs or the risks the whole society bears as a result. Meanwhile, the companies so closely tied to our cheap-and-easy food system are doing everything in their power – from public relations to greenwashing – to keep the truth out of sight. From peanuts, maize and rice to bread, milk and beer, how does food find its way onto our tables? Who decides what we eat? How can we build better networks of social support so that we can put genuinely safe produce on the table? There is still so much to talk about when it comes to food.

As consumers of food, if we pay more attention to the farmers and the land that directly produce what we eat, caring about their livelihoods and the ecological questions they face, we are already on the path to eating well ourselves. Over the past year, we have followed many people who till the land with great dedication – from the Greater Khingan Range in Heilongjiang to Chuxiong in Yunnan, from Pinggu in Beijing and Baoding in Hebei to Heshun in Shanxi. Their backgrounds differ, the crops and wild foods they gather differ, their circumstances differ, yet all share the wish to protect the ecosystem and eat well. In 2025, Food Talk launched a new series, “100 People Who Feed Us”. In 2026, we hope to use the voices of working people as a lens for finer, deeper conversations about the food system that sustains us.

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In 2025, Foodthink continued to create spaces where people who care about food and farming can meet and exchange ideas, hosting more than thirty online and offline events in the form of sharing sessions, reading groups, markets and workshops. We went deep into the fields to document how extreme weather is battering agriculture, and took to the international stage to carry the voices of China’s agroecological smallholder farmers; we dug for traditional wisdom in fermentation crocks and seed banks, and imagined future food and farming systems through fiction games and board games.

This year, “Extreme Weather” and “Climate Change” became the keywords. From the shattering and reorganisation of villages and towns after the July storms in Hunan, to the climate shocks that struck Guangdong and Guangxi at year’s end, we brought meteorologists, agricultural researchers, first-hand witnesses and chroniclers into dialogue, seeking to understand how climate change is rewriting the map of Chinese agriculture and how the people living through it are coping.

In 2025, we amplified individual voices – from the long journey of a returning silkworm farmer towards reconciliation with the self, to the joys and worries of Altay herders facing the markets and the pastures – and followed the “going overseas” footsteps of post-1990s agroecological smallholder farmers as they travelled from home to Thailand and to Rome. The “‘Fake Meat’ Displaces Real Meat” series of creative sharing sessions wove the voices of grassland herders together with academic perspectives, probing the complex questions behind industrially produced meat substitutes.

In 2025, we opened The Vanishing Foods with our readers, drawing on cases from China and abroad to explore the protection of food biodiversity and the survival of local culture. At the book launch for Fermented China: Yunnan and Guizhou, the conversation travelled from the fermentation traditions of Yunnan and Guizhou to the endurance of regional culture. In keeping with this theme, we ran interactive calls – “Today: ‘No’ Supply” and “Eat Something Nice” … Through interaction and reading, we asked: as delicious flavours vanish, what else will we lose, and what can we still create?

In person, at the “Hands at Work” market in Beijing and the harvest festivals across the towns and countryside of Guangdong, Foodthink joined forces with the Beijing Organic Farmers Market to set up a smallholder farmers’ table, handcraft workshops and more. We invited Spaceship Earth! to bring its interactive board game, and also presented the “Back to the Future” climate-change novel continuation game and the “Poems Between Meals” collage-poetry game, sparking reflection on the present and imagination of a sustainable future.

The Last Letter of 2025: Foodthink’s Harvest Festival “Stunt” Showcase

Foodthink held the “The Flowing Table” food and farming media workshop from 5 to 7 September. Centring on the theme of “The Flowing Table”, it explored four kinds of “flow” – climate change, trade, people and technology, and discourse and narrative – to examine and analyse our food and farming system, and the complex global flows behind what we eat.

This workshop brought together a diverse group of participants: alongside traditional news media, there were media editors from knowledge platforms, and independent creators who have long worked on the frontlines, documenting smallholder farmers’ adaptation practices and climate disasters through film.

In addition, Foodthink’s sister organisation, the Beijing Organic Farmers Market, provided workshop participants with an “agroecological smallholder” lunch. While discussing how agriculture should respond to extreme weather, how to support sustainable farming, and how to rebuild trust between consumers and producers, Foodthink was also supporting smallholder farmers through the most everyday, most direct of actions.

– Facing Climate Change: Rural Social Organisations in Action –

Climate change has made “natural disasters” in the countryside an ever more everyday reality. Social organisations are working to explore how to build climate resilience in rural areas. Over the past two decades, they have found ways to respond to the climate crisis across multiple fields – agricultural livelihoods, energy transition, disaster preparedness and reduction, rural elder care, gender equality and health. So how do social organisations define the problem when they step into the intersection of rural life and climate change, and how do they act? What successes and setbacks have they met, and what reflections do they carry forward?

The wisdom of those who came before and the pitfalls they stumbled into – we have distilled it all into this report: “Research on Pathways for Rural Social Organisations to Address Climate Change”.

With the support of Oxfam (Hong Kong) Beijing Office, Foodthink has over the past year conducted extensive interviews and questionnaire research, and held workshops in Nanning and Xianyang respectively, engaging in in-depth discussions with fellow farmers, village cadres, social organisations and scholars in an attempt to answer the questions above. The report’s core finding is this: it is not only the climate that is changing – the countryside is changing too, and only by understanding this transformation can one grasp the underlying logic of climate work. At the report launch, Foodthink stressed that a genuine pathway to climate resilience can only be found on the basis of a deep understanding of the problems inherent to rural life, and called on colleagues in the public-interest community: “Don’t turn mitigation into a numbers game, and don’t turn adaptation into wordplay.”

Report Launch | Rather Than Turning Pale at the Mention of “Climate”, Better to Put Down Steady Roots in the Countryside

“Thank Climate Change for Bringing the Countryside into Focus”

Is Climate Change Really Just a “Natural Disaster” in the Countryside?

– Co-Building and Co-Learning Camp: Local Agroecology Systems –

No matter how eloquently one speaks of agroecology, it all comes down to growing well. The increasingly severe challenges posed by climate change and the market have only underscored the importance of good technique: it can improve crop quality and resilience, reduce costs, and deliver yields no less than those of chemical agriculture.

Where, though, can such techniques be found? In December 2025, Foodthink hosted the second Co-Building and Co-Learning Camp: Local Agroecology Systems at Huiling Farm in Guangzhou, drawing over thirty participants from across China who aspire to work in agroecology. The camp explored not only the underlying logic of ecological growing techniques but also invited traditional smallholder farmers, new-generation farmers, consumer co-purchasing organisations and NGOs into a shared conversation: in a market for ecological and organic produce where “blooming flowers begin to dazzle the eye”, how can smallholder farming households build on their own strengths, press forward steadily, and find a path to livelihood and purpose? In that respect, the camp was nothing more than the starting line of a long marathon. Foodthink will organise a third co-learning camp this year – farmers who are interested are invited to star Foodthink’s WeChat account so as not to miss the latest training information.

Learn a Set of Practical Agroecology Techniques in Three Days | Call for Applications

– And More –

As usual this year, a few articles have vanished and cannot appear in this piece. To read them, leave a message on Foodthink’s WeChat account with the keywords “丑团”, “地膜”, “一刀切” or “撑伞”. Please also follow Foodthink on Douban and Xiaohongshu, so you don’t lose track of us.

Last, Last of All

All of us at Foodthink wish you in the Year of the Horse

🐎 meals in a flash, 🐎 feasts in a flash!

● On 7 February, Foodthink took full charge (for just one day) of Jishi, the physical store of the Beijing Organic Farmers Market, to see what delicious New Year’s dishes we got to enjoy. Orders can still be placed – hurry and get your healthy, delicious eco New Year’s dishes!

Coordination: Li Ye, Kai Rui

Editor: Tianle