Weekly supply at Xiaoliushu Farm, Shunyi, has dropped from 200 boxes to 40; at Kongkonggu Farm, Pinggu, aubergines and tomatoes were nearly all lost. Autumn sowing is delayed by almost a month, and national wholesale prices are up 40%.
Jinzi grows heirloom yellow garden peas using biodynamic farming on mountains above 3,000 metres in Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture. Shipping lasts only about two weeks a year; this year, three jin of pods finally reached the dining buddies’ table.
Foodthink chats with director Liu Taifeng and producer Zhu Tong about their in-depth research into delivery riders before filming, and about riders and programmers being equally trapped in the system – and how to find our footing when faced with platforms.
Nichole, 55, spent a decade turning her Texas yards into a jungle of food and herbs without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. She and Yunnanese Zhang Yiqing — a cross-generational pair — bonded over refusing the American suburban lawn before Nichole moved to rural Pennsylvania to practise permaculture on larger land.
From saccharin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to genetically modified seeds, Monsanto kept its profits and left the pollution to society for a century. Sun Yat-sen University’s Xu Zhun, Zhejiang University’s Zhou Mujun and others discuss The Seed Empire: who sets the rules, and who pays?
Apollo Go in Wuhan leaves drivers with nothing but remote fire-fighting; Bianlifeng locks store managers’ experience outside the algorithm; Meituan’s system turns the time riders save by running red lights into new standards — power is accelerating toward the platforms.
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
Former high-school maths teacher Lü Lu spent three months interning at Xiqing Farm in Daxing, Beijing. Working with the earth each day, she found years of troublesome allergies finally gone – and learned to keep the growth of thirty-odd crops constantly on her mind.
At Pengcheng Natural Farm in Yinlin Village, Conghua—pruning lychee branches, leaving grass to nourish the soil, reduced tillage and less fertilising—these everyday labours of Natural Farming were four gifts of letting go, simplicity, relaxation and acceptance from an ecological agriculture internship.
Twenty-four years after its ban, “lean-meat powder” is still detectable in pork, and residues of hormones such as trenbolone and metandienone are almost absent from food safety spot-check lists—behind athletes’ positive doping tests lie hidden risks of everyday hormone ingestion for ordinary people.