Work vibe so heavy you can’t stomach a takeaway box; sweet soup 3–5 yuan dearer than dine-in; a rider’s hand slashed in the snow. Dozens of readers wrote down specific moments of pushing back against takeaway – from ready meals to plastic packaging, all pointing to a proper meal.
A cup of Americano squeezed to six yuan, a meat pancake to ten — traffic has become the platform’s weapon to force shops into loss-making price concessions. Pinhaofan’s cheapness is no technological innovation, but a cost borne jointly by shop owners and riders.
Rooted in Heshun, Shanxi, for a decade, Maomeng protects the North China leopard’s habitat through ecological agriculture without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. Project lead Hannah tells how a single cornfield connects leopard populations, villagers and the urban public.
In 2023, The Examination and The Washington Post found that several US Registered Dietitians took money from beverage and sugar industry associations to endorse products while hiding sponsorship — and that the American Beverage Association is itself a principal sponsor of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND).
Li Jidong’s 70 mu of farmland in Luanzhou, Hebei, is blanketed in shredded mulch film from a neighbouring feed-processing plant. The agriculture and environment bureaus cite the same regulations yet each insists the pollution is the other’s to tackle. Spring sowing looms, yet he still cannot sow.
Research Fellow Wang Xiaoyi (Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) unpacks the contradiction between pasture-fattened yaks that “can’t fetch a fair price” and local meat that herders “can’t afford”. After marketisation “disembedded” beef and mutton from pastoral life, he asks how to “re-embed” them into the community.
Renting an Airbnb in Sydney to ring in the New Year, a family found avian influenza pushing eggs to nearly four yuan each, Chinese noodles at eighty a bowl, and coffee nearly doubled. Only back in China did she realise how precious that home-cooked bowl was.
Ren Yingying of Lianxiang Farm was invited by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to the GFFA in Berlin. The position paper she co-drafted demands breaking multinational corporations’ control over seeds, land and supply chains, promoting agroecology, and safeguarding smallholder farmers’ land and policy-participation rights.
Among the more than ten ecological farms Foodthink visited, new-generation farmers bring wildly diverse professional backgrounds. Above the shared bottom line of no chemicals, from five mu of intensive cultivation to a garden-style life, every farm is the embodiment of its owner’s ideals.
Meituan, a major generator of food-delivery plastic waste, has begun funding environmental organisations working on plastic reduction. Spanning fundraising ethics to corporate PR tactics, Shan Shui Conservation Center co-founder Sun Shan and freelance environmental writer Ma Tianjie ask whether public-interest organisations can hold their independence against polluter funding.
