As Grain Rain arrives, rain nourishes the hundred grains, and the fields enter the busiest and most vibrant season of the year. After two weeks of quiet pause, Foodthink is also embarking on a fresh start. With a timely shower, we plant new seeds in the soil and bring new voices back to our platform. After some time apart, we take this opportunity to reintroduce ourselves.
Who is Foodthink?
Foodthink is a content platform dedicated to food and agriculture issues, and a knowledge, information and writing community centred around sustainable food and farming. Through original content and public events, we present a complex and authentic picture of the food and farming system to our readers.
Founded in 2017, Foodthink was established by a group of partners with long-standing experience in agricultural and food practice and research. The name can be interpreted as a ‘food news agency’ or a ‘society for food literacy’. It brings together individuals from diverse fields and regions who share a common concern for food and farming—scholars, journalists, small-scale farmers, agricultural workers, civil society organisations, and consumers. Through ongoing documentation and dialogue, we hope to foster a fairer and more sustainable food and farming system.
In 2022, to reflect the multifaceted world of food and agriculture across different mediums, Foodthink launched the podcast ‘Food Talk’. We bring our microphones into the fields, aiming to amplify more grassroots voices. At the same time, Foodthink uses its video channel to stream events and share insightful conversations, encouraging wider public engagement in discussions about food and farming.
What does Foodthink focus on?
What dimensions deserve our attention when building a sustainable and equitable food and farming system? Below are the key themes Foodthink has consistently tracked and debated since its founding.
Smallholder livelihoods
Since its founding, Foodthink has remained focused on the realities faced by smallholder farmers, striving to secure a fairer market and social environment that affords ecological farming practitioners greater room to manoeuvre. Across China, more than 200 million smallholders cultivate 70 per cent of the country’s arable land; the enduring reality of small-scale farming within a major agricultural nation is a constant that is not going away. Viewed in a broader context, smallholders not only produce roughly a third of the world’s food supply but also stand as a vital force in tackling climate change, safeguarding genetic resources, and preserving biodiversity. Yet their contributions have long been overlooked, while the space they have to sustain their livelihoods continues to shrink. Over recent years, under the sway of corporations, digital platforms, and larger-scale commercial systems, smallholders have steadily lost their say over land use, production standards, and how they run their businesses.
Through ongoing documentation and reporting, Foodthink shines a light on the true conditions these farmers face on their land, helping the public appreciate their vital role and contributions to the wider food and farming system. Beneath the sweeping narratives of building an “agricultural powerhouse” and driving “agricultural modernisation”, Foodthink’s focus remains grounded in a simpler question: how can every smallholder secure reliable markets for their produce, have land to work, and keep a home to return to?
◉ Throughout the winter of 2023, prices for mid- to high-end fruit took a sharp dive, while the retail price of navel oranges—considered an everyday staple—repeatedly fell below 6 yuan per jin. In December 2023, Foodthink travelled to Huichang County in Ganzhou City, Jiangxi Province, a heartland for navel orange cultivation, where dozens of roadside warehouses in Youshui Township were found bursting at the seams with fruit.
Workers in the Food and Farming System
It is not merely food that journeys from the land to the table, but the people who work at every stage of this chain. Behind our daily meals lies the often-hidden labour of farmers, greengrocers, waitstaff, sorting staff, and delivery riders. In recent years, Foodthink has been closely observing how the livelihoods and daily lives of both veteran and emerging food and farming workers are being reshaped by external forces, from industrialised food systems to digital capitalism. What pressures, uncertainties, aspirations, and hopes define their existence?
Climate change
Farmers have always depended on the weather. But when the climate shifts, what are they to do? As climate change becomes entangled with broader rural transformations, and as the most vulnerable smallholder farmers silently bear the costs of both natural disasters and human-made crises, our reflection on prevailing development models falls woefully short of the gravity of the situation. ‘1.5 degrees Celsius’, ‘unprecedented disasters’, ‘heatstroke’ – these terms are steadily entering our everyday vocabulary, sounding an alarm that climate change is already disrupting agriculture and food production, while reshaping power dynamics. Will climate change spell the collapse of our food systems, or present a pivotal opportunity for transformation? The outcome rests on the actions we take now. But first, we must clearly recognise the crossroads ahead.
Last year, Foodthink documented south-western farmers switching to upland rice, northern farmers digging drainage ditches, a Beijing farm wiped out overnight by extraordinary flooding, and extreme heat in Shaanxi that threw orchard flowering cycles into disarray while leaving workers to suffer heatstroke… By chronicling climate change’s disruption of agricultural and food systems, we strive to keep our focus firmly on the ground, building a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between climate and land, and searching for truly equitable and sustainable solutions.
◉ In April 2024, a severe drought struck Yunnan, leaving the rice terraces in Mojiang deeply fissured. Image source: Yunnan SILI Centre
Biodiversity
Farming represents humanity’s foremost interaction with the natural world, yet it profoundly affects life beyond us: wild plants, fungi, animals, and even microorganisms. From an ecological standpoint, diverse natural systems are the very foundation of human survival. Which farming practices erode biodiversity? How does the relentless drive toward uniform commercial varieties undermine both human dietary diversity and species richness? Why might everyday habits like purchasing milk tea or ordering takeaway potentially threaten wildlife?
Having grasped this intricate relationship between food, farming, and biodiversity, a more pressing question arises: what agricultural systems can nourish humanity whilst simultaneously safeguarding the habitats and reproduction of other species? Which farmers continue to conserve and save seeds, and what policies and measures are needed to sustain the wisdom and practice of keeping seeds within local communities? Since its inception, Foodthink has continuously tracked and debated these very issues.
Shifts in the Food and Farming System
After decades of development, putting food on the table is no longer a concern for Chinese people. Consequently, agriculture’s importance has yielded to industry, increasingly relegated to the margins. Yet rising productivity has brought a host of fresh challenges. The chemicalisation of farming is degrading soil health; mechanisation is restructuring rural labour markets; and those who labour for national food security find that the income from a single acre of grain falls short of the price of an iPhone. Meanwhile, the agricultural supply chain traps growers in a race to the bottom, stripping them of bargaining power in the market… Such realities compel us to ask: why is this the case? What has happened to agriculture? To seek answers, Foodthink turns its focus to the livelihoods and living conditions of female farm machinery operators, drone pilots, pastoralists in Qinghai, and sugarcane growers in Guangdong.
Policy
High-standard farmland, land transfer schemes, plot consolidation, the Central No. 1 Document… What do these measures signify for different rural communities, and do they align with the needs of smallholder farmers? Are they sound approaches capable of delivering genuine improvement? Foodthink visits farming households every year to monitor the tangible impact of agricultural policies as they are implemented on the ground. Policies are more than mere documents; to craft measures that truly work, we believe the answers lie in the fields and with the farmers.
Eating Well
Within the grand narratives of modernisation, the everyday tends to slip out of sight. Yet when we turn our gaze back to daily life, we realise that life’s biggest concerns are simply “eating well” – paying attention to our grains and vegetables, and looking after our bodies, our environment, our labour and our dignity through the practical routines of everyday living. Three meals a day may seem like a small thing, but they are inextricably linked to distant fields, complex production chains, and the lifestyle and values we choose for ourselves.
How can we use ourselves as a method? Many are already experimenting with various practical approaches. Through stories of those taking action, Foodthink encourages everyone to make themselves the method. You might begin by tending your own garden, by daily caring for the microbes in your fermented vegetables and kombucha, by growing vegetables on a balcony, or simply by composting kitchen scraps.
◉ Kombucha made by Xiao Fang, a close friend of Foodthink. Source: Xiao FangInternational Trends
Uncertainty in the global landscape is increasingly having a direct impact on worldwide food and farming systems. The disruptions brought by conflict are now plainly visible—food crises, fertiliser shortages, and blocked supply chains. These shifts are not only affecting agricultural production in developing nations but are also reaching the dinner tables of wealthier countries. Foodthink has been closely tracking global food and farming developments, from the latest research and innovative practices to forward-looking debates and policy shifts. We continually examine how these international changes tangibly affect local communities, land, and production.
Key Focuses for This Year
International Year of Women in Farming
This year marks the UN’s “International Year of Women in Farming”. Foodthink is launching the “Her and the Land” content initiative, shining a light on the labour, lived experiences, and circumstances of women within agricultural and food systems. For generations, women have shouldered much of the work that keeps everyday food and farming systems running—from cultivating fields and managing markets to direct retail. Yet their contributions are frequently overlooked, or even rendered invisible. Through interviews, written features, and workshops, Foodthink will document the women working across these systems and share their stories. We aim to understand how women’s participation shapes our food networks, and we invite everyone to join the conversation on how a fairer, more dignified future can be realised for women in agriculture.
International Year of Pastoralists and Pastoral Lands
Food does not originate solely from farmland and crop cultivation. Pastoral regions, which sustain the lives and livelihoods of countless herders, are among China’s most vital yet most frequently overlooked ecological and livelihood spaces. Against the backdrop of the UN’s International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, Foodthink will focus on examining what pasture degradation actually looks like in China, how climate change impacts the resilience of pastoral communities, and how value chain returns are distributed between the cattle and sheep markets and the herders themselves.
◉ Herders grazing near Qinghai Lake ride motorcycles to guide their flocks back to the pens. Photo: Jiao Xiaofang
Climate Change
Climate change is an issue Foodthink has been closely tracking for some time. This year, we are particularly focused on finding solutions, especially technologies or collaborative models that bring tangible benefits to smallholder farmers and communities. We warmly welcome partners working in agriculture and food systems (including fellow farmers, village officials, cooperatives, NGOs, researchers, and others) to get in touch. Together, we aim to explore and promote climate resilience measures, giving farmers the confidence to weather extreme events and allowing us all to eat with greater peace of mind. We will also be launching small grants for frontline practitioners, so please keep an eye on our forthcoming updates.
Those Who Feed Us
From farmers working the land to rural e-commerce livestream hosts, supermarket sorters, delivery riders, wet market stallholders, and restaurant owners, Foodthink uses the written word to document the stories of every labourer along the food supply chain, from production right through to consumption, alongside their living conditions. Since last year, Food Talk has launched the “100 People Who Feed Us” series, inviting individuals across the food and agriculture value chain to share their stories. If you are part of this chain too, please do get in touch.
Public Events
Beyond our original content, Foodthink collaborates with numerous partners to create spaces where those concerned with food and agricultural issues can meet and exchange ideas. Last year, through more than 30 online and in-person sharing sessions, book clubs, markets, and workshops, we brought genuine field-level challenges to a broader audience — from the impact of extreme weather on agriculture to discussions on biodiversity conservation featured in *The Disappearing Food*; from the local wisdom preserved in fermentation traditions to interactive board games and collage poetry at the ‘Hands-on Craft’ market.
This year, Foodthink will host screenings and discussion events for the documentary *Whose Dining Table, Whose Pasture*, supported by the Lianhe Creative Programme. The film examines how imported beef and lamb have disrupted the livelihoods of local herders around Qinghai Lake, while also probing the global supply chains behind the meat on our plates. If you are interested in this topic and have a suitable venue or community group for hosting a discussion, please do not hesitate to contact us.
What else we do
Lianhe Creative Programme
To gain a clearer picture of today’s food and agricultural landscape, and to empower more voices in exploring the complexities behind these issues, Foodthink, together with various charitable and media partners, launched the ‘Lianhe Creative Programme’ in 2024 and 2025. The initiative supports creators and researchers undertaking fieldwork in the food and agriculture sectors, providing funding to help them produce content aimed at the general public.
Over the past two years, supported projects have been published steadily, maintaining public interest and encouraging wider conversation around pastoral communities, farmers, and the broader food system. Though these subjects might be overlooked in mainstream media, the ‘Lianhe Creative Programme’ has allowed previously unseen issues to gradually come to light, inviting us all to seek answers together.
Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme
Since its establishment, Foodthink has consistently supported young people with a keen interest in food and agriculture, particularly those eager to pursue careers in ecological farming. We accompany them as they develop a deeper understanding of the field. In 2026, Foodthink will launch the sixth cohort of the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme. Over the past few years, the initiative has successfully matched nearly a hundred aspiring practitioners with experienced ecological farms across the country, where they spend three to twelve months working and learning alongside mentor farmers.
◉ March 2023: The ecological agriculture interns at Lüwo Farm watch the sunset together after a day’s work.
Small Action Grants
Although we are based in Beijing, we recognise that slogans, research, and ideas alone cannot transform food and farming systems. Ultimately, it is the sum of small actions taken by individuals and communities that brings about real change. Change comes with a cost, and new experiments may well falter. We have also observed that many activists and communities are held back simply by a lack of seed funding to test new ideas and drive new initiatives. Foodthink’s ‘Lianhe Programme’ is designed to support these local food and farming actions, helping practitioners identify effective working methods. From community seed banks and rural school gardens to local market walking groups and traditional food research, Foodthink has been privileged to engage with and support these concrete, innovative efforts. We look forward to collaborating with even more changemakers in the future.
Research and Advocacy
Beyond our daily reporting and discussions, we also undertake specialised research and advocacy.
In 2023, in collaboration with numerous farming communities, experts, and media partners, we engaged with the State Administration for Market Regulation to ensure the revised *Measures for the Supervision and Administration of Quality and Safety in the Market Sale of Edible Agricultural Products* acknowledged the needs of small-scale, farmer-made processed goods, securing the right of farmers to produce and sell their own dried foods.
In 2025, building on years of frontline fieldwork and targeted research, we released the report *Action Pathways for Rural Social Organisations Addressing Climate Change*. It records and analyses how, over the past twenty years, social organisations have navigated approaches to tackling the climate crisis across multiple domains, including agricultural livelihoods, energy transition, disaster risk reduction, rural elderly care, gender equality, and health. We found that not only is the climate shifting, but rural areas are transforming too; only by understanding these rural changes can we grasp the core logic of climate work. Click “Read Original” at the bottom of the article to download the full report. Come read it and find your like-minded allies.
◉ With the support of Oxfam Hong Kong’s Beijing Representative Office, Foodthink spent the past year conducting extensive interviews and survey research on how social organisations can enhance climate resilience in rural areas, culminating in the release of *Action Pathways for Rural Social Organisations Addressing Climate Change*.
Get in Touch
If you have your own observations and insights on agriculture, rural communities, and food, along with the writing skills and passion to share them, we warmly welcome your submissions. Potential contributors of any background—including but not limited to those listed below—are also welcome to reach out for a chat. You never know, a conversation might just inspire a piece:
Ecological smallholder farmers with experiences, ideas, lessons learned, and questions they wish to share with fellow practitioners;
Scholars researching agriculture, rural communities, and food issues, hoping their academic work can inform and benefit a broader audience;
Journalists and media professionals with a long-standing focus on the agricultural and food industries;
Professionals working in the agricultural and food sectors;
Researchers with a sustained interest in rural challenges;
Professionals working in NGOs or government departments on rural development, environmental protection, and related fields.
Currently, Foodthink is particularly focused on the following editorial themes:
The relationship between climate change, biodiversity, and food and farming systems;
The value chains of food and agricultural products;
The impact of the retail and hospitality sectors on agricultural production;
The influence of emerging technologies and platform economies—such as e-commerce, drones, solar photovoltaics, and AI—on food and farming systems;
False solutions masquerading as “low-carbon” or “green,” alongside genuine, effective alternatives;
Herders’ livelihoods and ecological shifts in pastoral regions;
Food and farming topics intersecting with broader public issues such as the environment, technology, public health, gender, and geopolitics.
Foodthink on Other PlatformsBeyond our WeChat Official Account, we also invite you to follow Foodthink across various platforms to stay updated with the latest developments and in-depth content on sustainable food and farming. We look forward to connecting with you wherever you are:
WeChat Channels: @食通社
To avoid losing touch, getting lost, or any other unnecessary misadventures, here’s a quick guide:
🫱 For submissions, joining our community, discussions, collaborations, event updates, or simply to peek at Foodthink’s daily workflow and office lunches, feel free to add a contact. This is Foodthink’s Assistant (ID: Foodthink2) — where work and life happily intersect. If you’ve already added the assistant, there’s no need to do so again.
🫱 Hope for the best, prepare for the worst — please also follow our backup account “Foodthink”.
🫱 Feel free to look us up across different social media platforms whenever you like. You might just be struck by a sudden wave of nostalgia for Foodthink (between you and me, we also have an official website: www.foodthink.cn)
One-click access — see what we’ve been up to each year
