No Lunch Today — A Book List Instead

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On World Book Day, 23 April 2025, Foodthink brings together recommendations from its editors, authors and fellow travellers in the field. Though we did not compare notes beforehand, our selections converged, unbidden, on the most fundamental relationships underpinning human survival: our connection to food, land and the natural environment.

From Bruno Latour’s exploration of how to reframe political imagination in the face of ecological crisis, to the transformations of rural France under the pressures of modernisation; from a firsthand chronicle of China’s arduous environmental movement, to the complex interplay between capital’s entry into rural areas and rural society; from Abe Tsukasa’s exposé of industrial food additives, to warnings about vanishing food diversity and a deeper reckoning with the modern dietary landscape — these works together form a multifaceted examination of our contemporary food and environmental systems. More importantly, they remind us that beyond the mainstream body of knowledge lie no less rich and valuable ways of understanding the world.

We hope these books will open new horizons and imaginations, offering us, amid the complexities of the present, a chance to rediscover our connection to the land, to nature, and to one another.

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

Author: [France] Bruno Latour

Translator: Hu Enhai

Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House | Ye Ren

Published November 2023

Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime is a slim volume by French sociologist Bruno Latour, published in 2017 during Trump’s first term. It is both a response to Trump’s rise to power and his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and a meditation on ecological politics, the left–right divide, and the tensions and potential convergence between localisation and globalisation. When he died in 2022, one wonders whether he could have foreseen Trump’s second election. For those of us who will live through his second term and bear the consequences of his actions, this little book may offer inspiration for our strategies of action: how to create a globalisation that serves both ecology and people while defending diverse localities.

——Tian Le (Foodthink founding editor; convener of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market)

Maison Loin: A History of Rural France

Author: [United States] Sarah Farmer

Translator: Ye Zang

Guangxi Normal University Press / Wang Mountain

Published November 2024

The countryside is withering, yet in politics, culture and consumption the image of “the countryside” is endlessly recycled — even treated as the wellspring of a nation’s distinctive character. The imagined village drifts ever further from reality. This is not twenty-first-century China; it is twentieth-century France.

The countryside in this country is more than wine estates: it once belonged to smallholders too. Contrary to popular perception, rural France before the Second World War looked little different from the era of the War in the Vendée, with household farming still reliant largely on animal power. In the postwar years, however, rapid industrialisation and population movement brought about the “disappearance of the peasants”. The emptied villages were then filled with heterogeneous practices: mechanised modern agriculture with its tractors; urbanites buying up old farmhouses to convert into holiday cottages; utopian communes set up by young leftists.

My favourite passage is the story of photographer Raymond Depardon in the final chapter: the son of peasants, he did not realise until middle age that the countryside he had always longed to escape was vanishing. He resolved to document it with his camera — the pain of peasants “whose place of dwelling has been destroyed, yet who cannot go back to the past”.

——Wang Hao (Foodthink editor)

 In Search of Green China

Author: Tianjie Ma

Publisher | Polity

Published February 2025

If you care whether the water you drink each day and the air you breathe are clean; if you wonder why air quality in the north improved so markedly over the past decade, or why the government was unable to decide for twenty years whether to build a hydropower station on a free-flowing great river — then In Search of Green China should be on your must-read list.

On the subject of contemporary Chinese environmental history, this is the best book I have read. With a sharp and perceptive pen, the author weaves together multiple threads of China’s environmental governance over the past three decades through a cast of representative figures: the photographer who resigned a government post to document pollution of the mother river; the journalists and scholars who campaigned for the Nu River; the deputy minister at the Ministry of Environmental Protection who aspired to promote Green GDP and suffered repeated setbacks; ordinary citizens who flooded into public hearings; scientists straining to trace the sources of air pollution… Their fates intersect and spur one another on, producing the now-familiar toolkit of environmental governance: eliminating outdated production capacity, environmental impact assessment, public participation, and environmental protection inspection. What we take for granted today was won, through great effort, by the book’s protagonists in an era when “economic development overrode all else”. Some achieved fame and success; others saw their careers ruined; some have already left us.

The book’s guiding question is relentless: what kind of development do we actually need? Economic growth and environmental protection are the two contest threads running through the entire work, and their convergence or divergence determines the success or failure of China’s environmental governance — a key finding of the book. Yet the fundamental importance of the natural world to human civilisation has not yet been internalised in our national consciousness. In that sense, however successful ecological civilisation may appear on the surface, the pursuit of a green China continues.

——Kong Lingyu (Foodthink programme director; former environmental journalist)

Food Sovereignty and Ecofeminism

Author: [France] Lionel Astruc

China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing House

Published October 2020

Recently, in Africa’s Guinea-Bissau, women set fire to a facility operated and managed by a Chinese-funded enterprise, in resistance to a mining project that was devastating their environment — a desperate act to defend their land and homes, their survival and dignity. These women from Africa’s margins thus surfaced in Chinese-language media, and the “flames” of their fury briefly arrested public attention. It also reminded me of the Chipko movement that began in India in the 1970s — women who had themselves witnessed ecological destruction and the ruin of their livelihoods, bravely stepping forward to respond and act.

In Food Sovereignty and Ecofeminism, a collection of dialogues, the author interviews Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, a participant in the Chipko movement. The book reveals women’s experiences in Third World nations, distinct from the Western-centric world: women are not merely carers or victims but defenders of ecological justice and food sovereignty. From sowing to resistance, from kitchen to battlefield, they act with resilience and wisdom on the front line against capital’s plunder and ecological collapse. Ecofeminism offers another lens through which to think about ecological problems. If these issues speak to you, open this book and see them act again.

——Zhang Xiaoshu (Foodthink part-time contributor)

Insiders and Outsiders: The Social Foundations of Capital’s Entry into Rural Areas

Author: Xu Zongyang

Social Sciences Academic Press

Published May 2022

As the standard-bearer of scaled-up farming and agricultural modernisation, capital’s entry into rural areas is seen as a vital force for transforming “traditional” agriculture and comparatively “backward” smallholder production. This book stresses that capital’s penetration of the countryside does not bring about an automatic assembly of the factors of production; whether it succeeds depends on the process of interaction with rural society. Based on rigorous fieldwork, the book offers a paradoxical explanation for the failure of capital’s entry: to safeguard agricultural productivity, enterprises must remain “isolated” from the local community, yet that very isolation invites social disturbances, raises operating costs, and can even cause direct losses. The way forward, then, is to bridge the divide between “outsider” and “insider”, to minimise the disruptive effects of “the difference between us and them”, and to find how the “outside” can become “inside” — this is the path to efficiency and sustainability alike.

——Zhang Qian (Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Further Reading

Why Do We Eat So Much? The New Science of Appetite

Author: [United Kingdom] André Jenkinson

Translator: Wang Yinjun

Chongqing University Press

Published July 2023

The author is a doctor who has spent years working with severely obese patients. In his view, obesity is a disease that cannot be overcome by willpower. He calls calorie-counting diets “a battle destined to be lost” — what makes us fat are our genes and our food environment, and dieting only sends our appetites into overdrive, achieving the very goal of gaining weight. The real way out is to rebuild a healthy food system: to restore the well-functioning negative-feedback loop that tells the brain when to stop eating, thereby resetting the body’s weight set point. His advice is simple — cook your own meals, do the exercise you enjoy, savour your food. Yet a healthy eating habit is precisely the hardest step, which prompts a thought that extends beyond the book itself: what is it that has made us unable to “waste” our time simply eating well?

——Doudou (Foodthink contributor)

Further Reading

Food Truths Exposed

Author: [Japan] Abe Tsukasa

Translator: Li Bo

Tianjin Education Publishing House

Published 2008

Abe Tsukasa was once a star employee at a prominent food-additive company and a “Food Additive God” — a man capable of deploying every type of additive to near-magical perfection.

For his daughter’s third birthday, he made an exception and took time off to come home for a meal. The moment he stepped through the door, his face drained of colour and he roared at his wife: “Why did you buy this for our child?” He meant the plate of meatballs on the table.

Those meatballs were Abe Tsukasa’s own masterpiece: made from beef trimmings that meat-processing plants had written off as waste, transformed by an ingenious combination of additives to alter the texture, neutralise the odour, boost the aroma, and enhance the colour — more than thirty in total, turning refuse into treasure. The tasty, dirt-cheap meatballs not only brought the additive company hefty profits but made the processing plant a fortune, enough to put up a brand-new building. But he had never imagined that they would end up on his own dining table, in the mouth of his beloved daughter.

He knew better than anyone in the world what was in that plate of meatballs. Of course, he could guarantee that every individual additive fell within safe limits — but with dozens of additives working in concert, even the hardiest human metabolism was bound to lose. What did such a combination and such a total load mean for a child whose bodily functions were still developing? No one could feel more dread than Abe Tsukasa.

He loved his own child, and from that love he came to care for others. Abe Tsukasa resigned from the company and became a food-safety educator. The opening of Food Truths Exposed recounts the very beef meatballs that changed his life.

——Kouzi (Foodthink contributor)

Further Reading

Vanishing Foods: What We Will Lose Beyond Flavour

Author: [United Kingdom] Dan Saladino

Translator: Gao Yubing

Wenhui Publishing House

Published December 2023

Vanishing Foods recounts the hunger that gripped the world after the Second World War and the ways capital and industrialisation rendered our food uniform. Ordinarily, “endangered species” refers to plants or animals facing extinction, but in this book the term draws our attention to foods that have already disappeared or are on the verge of doing so — and to the loss of the nutrition, genetics, and cultural knowledge they carry. Consider, for instance, the memangnarang, a citrus variety known in India as the “fruit of ghosts”: in traditional rituals it is laid upon the body of the deceased to shield them from restless spirits, yet today the market is dominated by sweet mandarins and oranges. Or take wild rice, which is naturally red, yet market preferences for cooking qualities have gradually domesticated rice towards white — while the unique Red Mouth glutinous rice of China is being carefully kept alive by a single farming family in Sichuan.

As our daily diet is increasingly controlled by capital systems, the ingredients available to us become identical and limited regardless of place or time; as our bond with the environment through food is severed, and the climate deteriorates further with every species lost, we need to know about the food varieties that lie outside the mainstream — screened out, nameless, and forgotten — as a way of resisting the fragility of the system. And so, another book —Free Food: Wild Plants and How to Eat Them becomes all the more vital. The author shares her accumulated knowledge of wild foraging, teaching us how the act of seeking food can be an opportunity to rebuild an intimate bond with the natural world, and how to gather — sustainably and with respect — the abundant, diverse foods that supermarkets have screened out.

——Zhou Chen (Foodthink contributor; PhD candidate in Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam)

Further Reading

A Feeling for the Organism

Author: [United States] Evelyn Fox Keller

Translator: Yang Xi

Yunnan People’s Publishing House

Published July 2024

Barbara McClintock was a scientist who devoted her entire life to studying maize. She regarded cells, organisms, and even ecosystems as one interconnected whole, and believed that science which ignores wholeness can only ever offer fragmented truth. She reflected on the shortsightedness of modern science and technology, warning that humanity reaps a bitter harvest from solving problems one-sidedly.

In the ever-faster — “involutionary”, even — era of molecular biology, McClintock’s approach looked like a “luxury”: she insisted on slow observation, breathing in rhythm with the life of each plant. She reminded us that true scientific discovery lies hidden within complexity, requiring observation and insight — yet competition and expediency are eroding that very spirit. In her time, she foresaw that biology would return to the tradition of natural history, re-embracing the wholeness of life. Her story is not merely a reflection on scientific method and paradigm; it is a profound lesson in how to “listen to nature”.

——Guan Qi (Foodthink contributor; head of the eastern office, Farmer Seed Network)

Further Reading

Nomads of the Altai: Ecology and Indigenous Knowledge

Author: Chen Xiangjun

Social Sciences Academic Press

Published September 2017

Based on long-term fieldwork among the Kazakh people of Fuyun County in the Altay region, the author gives a richly detailed account of Kazakh nomadic life and livelihoods. For a newcomer to nomadic studies like myself, this book corrected a crucial blind spot: beyond the mainstream of agrarian civilisation there exists an equally important, rich, coherent, and ancient nomadic civilisation.

In recent years the very concept of “nomadism” has been romanticised and appropriated — from “digital nomads” to the TV series My Altay — and yet none of these lets us glimpse what nomadism truly is. We either, sheltered beneath the canopy of mainstream ethnic discourse, lack the will to respect pastoral civilisation and other forms of life on equal terms; or we reflexively view the development of a distant, unfamiliar place through the lens of “economy first”. In this book, the author systematically examines, from a researcher’s standpoint, the relationship between nomadic knowledge systems and grassland ecology against the backdrop of economic development. He stresses that the development of a place must first respect the local people’s own knowledge ecosystem and inherent cultural traditions; otherwise, the result is social dislocation and ecological imbalance.

——Wu Yang (Foodthink contributor)

Further Reading

The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies

Author: [France] Marcel Mauss

Translator: Ji Zhe

Commercial Press

Published 2016

I cannot recall when I first read this book; I only feel the need to go back to it, to ease the lasting harm done by the poison of evolutionism I contracted through schooling as a child. What question was Mauss trying to answer in The Gift? “In archaic or primitive societies, what rules of law and self-interest oblige a gift to be repaid once accepted? What force resides in a gift that compels the recipient to reciprocate?” The Māori answer is this: within a gift there dwells a spiritual force called hau. The book The Gift carries that force too — may more readers come to feel it.

——Chen Jingjing (Foodthink contributor; head of Tusheng Studio)

Editors: Kerry, Wang Hao, ZX

Poster: Z X

Published by Foodthink