The film traces imported frozen beef and mutton from Xining markets driving down herders’ cattle and sheep purchase prices and livelihoods around Qinghai Lake. Post-screening, scholars discuss who bears the cost in the global meat supply chain and whether ordinary consumers can influence the other end of production.
In Jianyang, Sichuan, farmers pick up binoculars and finally see the egrets and kingfishers pecking grain in their fields daily. Pesticides climb the food chain to the birds in the sky; tomato netting tangles and kills collared scops owls; the “cleaner” the farmland, the less room for other life.
Grandma Kouzi of Villain Valley cuts a path for pumpkins, felling white ginger lilies loved for over a decade. After five years, hardy bananas proved they could fruit; she learned to leave care to the seasons—from “plant killer” to one who shares her fate with the land.
Auntie Huang in Hengzhou’s jasmine flower fields, Auntie Lu in Yingde’s tea gardens—both rely on decades of practised hand-and-eye judgement to know which flower to pick, which leaf to pluck. This experience cannot be written into machine instructions, yet is always classed as “requiring little technical skill.”
Forty-five days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, she walked into a Chaozhou mooncake factory to dust moulds—seven or eight thousand a day, hands never stopping. The conveyor line’s roar, the old master’s hand-over-hand laobing lessons, and workers’ chatter about freedom all marked the start of her gig life.
Two order pickers at Freshippo and Xiaoxiang say that under the pressure of algorithms, injuries must be borne alone; the contract casts both sides into a “pure business cooperation relationship”, denying any employment relationship — yet between dashes, colleagues still willingly lend a hand.
In 1998, Italian truffle giant Urbani Tartufi had 47 tonnes of Chinese truffles seized, having long blended them into black winter truffles for profit. On 29 September, Kunming Institute of Botany mycologist Yu Fuqiang and Yi returnee farmer Kang Li discuss online Chinese foragers’ plight under climate change.
Order pickers who have run orders at Hema (Freshippo) and Xiaoxiang, in dialogue: seven hours with no meal break scheduled, twenty thousand steps a day, pay tiers never disclosed, and PDA efficiency rankings that hook you like a game.
Marius Korsnes (Ma Li) and his NTNU team investigate the salmon, dairy and live-pig industry chains across borders, arguing that China’s animal protein consumption follows a logic of construction distinct from the West—plant protein has not been displaced, while farming’s resource costs have been “outsourced” overseas.
The documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture follows the trail from Xining’s frozen-food wholesale market to Qinghai Lake’s pastoral areas, documenting how imported frozen meat has sent procurement prices plummeting, leaving herders struggling to repay loans. Three screenings this weekend in Chengdu and Ningbo, with post-screening discussions with scholars.
