In Japanese, “soba” and “beside me” are homophones — housewarming noodles for neighbours, toshikoshi soba on Ōmisoka, enduring customs. In Nagano, the heart of soba country, from Jōmon-era famine porridge to Edo peddlers’ cries, this bowl’s journey hides in the everyday.
Unhappy that the old 32-square-metre house blocked the sun, Grandma Kouzi shrank to fifteen square metres in Wicked Valley, Fujian, from two old granaries. Rocket stove linked to heated kang wards off southern damp-cold; freezer-door skylights let in light and breeze. Eating, drinking, toileting, reading, exercise — all fits.
Two interns set off from Guixinyuan Farm, visiting five ecological farms across Guangdong and Guangxi, repeatedly recalibrating between the ease of Natural Farming and the pressures of yields, lease terms and labour – ultimately affirming the ideal of a Half-farming, Half-X life.
With over a decade in the villages – growing rice, raising chickens, brewing green plum wine, running rural tourism – Huang Yajun of Conghua’s Deep Cultivation centre offers, after multiple setbacks, a practitioner’s response to the academic judgement that rural work runs counter to modernisation.
Farmer Kouzi conflated the Yellow Gourd Beetle with fireflies because its common name contains “Ying”, and in fury kicked a drifting firefly—only afterwards learning that “Ying” (lustrous) and “Ying” (firefly) are entirely unrelated.
Xia Lili cooks for her meal companions in Yulin, Chengdu – a bowl of pa pa cai boiled in plain water, no oil, no salt, ten grains cooked into one pot of rice – bringing farmer friends, bodies and the land back to the same table.
In Zhaizi Village, Jianyang, Sichuan, Senior Agronomist Yuan Yong teaches smallholders the no-till cover method for growing rice hands-on. A few aunties and uncles sit round discussing whether it suits their plots; Grandpa Jiang decides on the spot to set aside two fen of land to try it.
Li Pengyue, running an ecological fruit orchard in Weihai, cannot protect her vegetable seedlings without pesticide, mirroring the plight of Jinpa, who holds the snow leopard captive over nine dead sheep in “Snow Leopard”. The only difference: one passively endures; the other actively cedes.
In a tea-growing village in the Hunan–Hubei borderlands, after a leading tea enterprise entered under the “company + farming household” model, all-round producers — from growing and picking to pan-firing and selling — were reduced to “partial tea farmers”, with value-added stages like tea-making and branding monopolised by the firm.
After the sequel premiered in spring 2024, four Foodthink editors gathered to rewatch Food, Inc., discussing whether the industrialised farming, seed monopolies and corporate grip on the food supply it exposes have worsened or improved in the United States—and whether China is facing the same problems.
