The Last Letter of 2025: Foodthink’s Harvest Festival “Mischief” Awards

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This is Foodthink’s last post of 2025. Didn’t see that coming, did you? No year-end summary! (Honestly, the annual review hasn’t been hauled out yet—please try again later…)

So instead, let’s have a look at the mischief we got up to at the Harvest Festival in Guangdong that just wrapped up!

◉Foodthink editor Yuyang in the midst of “casting spells”. Photography by Yan Qiange

Climate Fiction Co-Creation

Thanks to the annual Harvest Festival, we spent a winter solstice in Guangzhou as scorching as the summer solstice—Santa would need to ride a camel to get here! Perhaps this freakishly hot winter solstice can be blamed on climate change.

Over those three days, we took the titles of the hundreds of articles Foodthink had written over the past year about the land, farmers, food and climate, stirred them together with a spread of Cantonese delicacies, and turned them into fragments of a story. Close to a hundred grown-ups and kids at the venue each drew a word card at random and took part in a relay-writing session, crafting eight climate fiction (cli-fi) stories on the spot that would put AI to shame.

In these stories, you’ll catch a glimpse of Guangdong folk’s culinary flights of fancy—

  • The ultimate solution to saving humanity is actually… potatoes, corn, beef offal, ginger milk curd and rice noodle rolls?
  • The Ice… Ice Age descends, and the whole world becomes one grand morning tea spread!
  • Ginger milk curd finally has a CV to write: to fight over my departments, they were even hurling char siu bao at each other… Char siu bao didn’t provoke anyone…
  • Rice noodle rolls occupied the sky, and Cantonese folk transformed into cosmic free-range chickens…
These eight sci-fi stories stick to one creative principle: even in the apocalypse, the food must be delicious. A perfect echo of this year’s Harvest Festival theme: A Thousand Methods, A Hundred Skills, One Meal.

◉For more about the Harvest Festival, click the poster to follow the link.

Through everyone’s literary creations, we were given the chance to journey from “words” back to “reality” and reimagine the relationship between humanity, the land, climate, and food 🍚

Of course, creations this brilliant simply can’t stay confined to the Harvest Festival. We’ve compiled all eight stories and published them online—beyond pen and paper, achieving “digital immortality”. Plus, to capture the vivid state of mind of our old Guangzhou friends, we’ve also prepared an AIGC version—letting ChatGPT visualise these abstractions

👇Swipe to see what the AI imagines

*Kind reminder: please ensure you have dined today before viewing

Poems Between Meals: Guangfu Edition

Besides joining in the climate fiction relay writing, introverts could also settle down and mix Foodthink article titles with Guangdong specialities to create “Poems Between Meals”. True to Guangzhou’s reputation… never have we seen such delicious collage poems! Between the spaces in the words, we caught the breath of the land, tasted the flavours of the street, and shared our thoughts with one another.

◉View: Savouring Guangzhou’s whimsy and poetic spirit.

Nothing on the Menu Today

◉Everyone shared the hard-to-find foods they miss and the stories behind them.

When some familiar foods and flavours disappear, our relationship with the land, the climate, and our memories quietly shifts too. What foods could you once enjoy that are now nearly impossible to track down?

Green tangerines, Bai Tu Wa; Grandma’s stuffed pastries, the kway teow downstairs; Mushroom and Roasted Persimmon… What did they taste like? And why have they vanished?

We hope to record these vanishing foods together with you, preserving their flavour stories and the fond memories attached. We’d love for you to share your “Sold Out Today” finds in the comments!

◉Can you guess what this “food” is?

It was wonderful to meet so many Foodthink readers from the Greater Bay Area at the Harvest Festival—

some who came from Huizhou, some from Foshan, some from Shunde, some from Hong Kong,

and even veteran readers who have followed Foodthink since 2017.

Thank you for finding us in the real world—our online friendship has finally stepped off the screen! We’re truly grateful to all of you who have kept us company through one year after another on the other side. We also made a whole host of new friends, and we hope Foodthink will continue to walk alongside you as you eat well and live well in the days ahead.

Forum Recap

For the first time, Foodthink brought the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture, filmed with the support of the 2024 Lianhe Creative Programme, to Guangzhou to meet readers. The director delved deep into the pastoral areas around Qinghai Lake, documenting the impact of imported frozen beef and lamb once they hit local markets. The film reveals the blow dealt to local beef and lamb by the low prices of imported meat, posing a stark question: In the globalised meat supply chain, who enjoys the bargains, and who pays the price?

◉Poster for Whose Table, Whose Pasture

On the final afternoon, we invited Zhao Yushun and Yuan Zhenzhen—documentary filmmakers from rural communities who focus on rural issues—to share what they observed during their visits to villages in Guangdong and Guangxi this year. Fenglian, who has been deeply rooted in Guangzhou’s farming community, shared the challenges that two “Extra-Long Summers” in a row have brought to crop growing in Guangzhou. As agriculture and rural areas are battered by extreme weather, what changes are our cities and dining tables undergoing? Readers and consumers in the audience joined this discussion on extreme weather, grappling with reality and seeking solutions.

◉View: Sharing by Zhao Yushun; Sharing by Liao Fenglian; Reader Q&A. Photography by Ming Chun

On site, our special photographer also captured many heartwarming and joyful moments.

◉We hope you can share a knowing smile too. Photography by Yan Qiange
If you’re still wondering what the Harvest Festival is all about, put simply, it is China’s largest offline gathering for sustainable food and farming—born in Guangzhou, yet its influence already far exceeds the Two Guangs (Guangdong and Guangxi). Now in its ninth year, what began as a farmers’ market has grown into a cross-disciplinary gathering blending ecological agriculture, art, literature, and social issues. The Harvest Festival has always been the thread linking rural and urban, producers and those who live and eat in the city.

As the only out-of-town organiser of the Harvest Festival, Foodthink makes its way to Guangzhou every year to meet fellow growers and readers in the south. We’ve grown here, and we’ve borne witness here: when producers and consumers lift each other up, eating takes on a dignity and meaning beyond simply earning a living.

Bonus

In the images below, how many of the ecological smallholders featured in Foodthink’s coverage and collaborations can you spot?

◉Some answers are written right on the puzzle😂. Photography by Yan Qiange
2025—Happy wrap! After letting your imaginations run wild, may you still find the energy to walk the talk.

2026—See you again in Guangzhou, celebrating another bountiful year.

Eat Well, Drink Well, and May Everything Exceed Your Expectations

Planning: Li Ye

Editing: Kairui, Tianle

Fiction images: ZX, Li Ye

Published by Foodthink