The large-scale monoculture of the Plantationocene has dismantled ecosystems and rural communities, yet the traditions of care in the Qimin Yaoshu and Xu Guangqi’s Nongzheng Quanshu suggest that “non-plantation” farming can still become imaginable once more.
Shandong native Kouzi’s sixth winter in rural Fujian: from rocket stove kang to old granary turned warm room, from radish soup to dried pumpkin, the south’s damp cold at last gives way to ease.
Three Foodthink colleagues left their screens for Jishi, the ecological greengrocer in Sanyuanqiao — stacking stock, sorting produce, negotiating with customers over switching to another farm’s tomatoes — and in concrete physical labour rediscovered a tangible feel for life.
Forty years after dual contracting of grassland and livestock, J village in Qinghe County still has only 92 grassland certificates while pastoral households exceed 200. They sow lucerne on their hay meadows, pay irrigation charges, and buy fodder from farming areas at twice their own harvest before winter.
Saturday 7 February: eight Foodthink members take over Jishi, the community veg shop at Sanyuanqiao, swapping writing for veg selling. Join us in person or online for a year-end report, food and agriculture sharing session, Chinese New Year live shopping, and a film screening with lamb soup dinner.
Ÿnsect, the European insect-protein unicorn that raised USD 625 million, has been wound up by a French court. A UK Government-commissioned life cycle assessment also shows insect meal’s carbon emissions far exceed soybean meal’s — the capital narrative of “eating bugs equals eco-friendliness” is being punctured by full-chain data.
Farmer Kou Yanding of Villain Valley, Fujian, has sued Baidu at the Beijing Internet Court, alleging its AI fabricated an extortion charge against her — the first documented AI defamation case in China.
Chen Jingjing, a 20-year researcher of rural construction, worked a paddy for the first time this year in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou—no herbicide, sun-drying. Rice cost over 30 yuan a jin, and he also hit a hard wall woven from land rent, hired labour and the division of labour.
Anonymous readers from southwest, northwest, and central China described farmland abandonment due to water shortage after high-standard farmland conversion, raw subsoil exposed by construction destroying soil fertility, and outsider large-scale operators suspected of leasing land to extract subsidies. Contractors also reported plunging profits and overly stringent oversight.
Last century, the Sugar Association funded Harvard scholars to blame heart disease on fat; Ancel Keys’s Seven Countries Study cemented this with cherry-picked data. The first Dietary Guidelines for Americans ushered in half a century of low-fat wrong turns — only the 2026 edition finally rejects added sugars entirely.
