I. Drying White, Hanging Gold; Brewing Spirits and Curling Smoke From the Start of Winter, nestled among the mountains of south-west Zhejiang and across the Songgu Plain, the people of Songyang begin preparing for the New Year’s Eve dinner. In the streamside and hillside villages, set against rivers and mountains,…
Looking back at 2025, what news about food and agriculture left the deepest impression on you? Was it the struggle to harvest crops amidst the relentless rains of North China, the delivery platform wars, the heated debates over pre-prepared meals that nearly sparked violence, or…? Over the past year, Foodthink,…
I. Dismantling the Myths of Western Modern Agriculture We are all familiar with a certain paradigm of social progress: humanity moved from hunting and gathering and slash-and-burn techniques to settled agriculture, and then from the intensive cultivation of small-scale farming to large-scale industrial agriculture. But is this truly how history…
As I put pen to paper, it is the second day of the twelfth lunar month in the Year of the Snake—the solar term of Major Cold, and the fourth day of the ‘Fourth Nine’. There is an old saying, ‘During the third and fourth nine-day periods, one walks on…
Can three people accustomed to long hours behind computer screens actually cope when they decide to sell vegetables at a community eco-shop in Beijing’s Sanyuanqiao? Facing endless screens, data, and meetings every day, have you ever wondered: what is the point of all this? In this accelerated era, countless streams…
“Cutting grass” (dǎ cǎo) refers to the harvesting of forage. This is a term used exclusively within herding regions. In early August 2025, I returned to a traditional Kazakh herding village in south-eastern Altay, just in time for the grass harvest. Since the TV series My Altay became a sensation…
Attention all departments: Foodthink’s ‘Occupy Jishì 3.0’ and Annual Meeting Special Project is now officially underway! From 10:00 to 22:00 on Saturday, 7 February, we will be taking over Jishì, the Beijing Organic Farmers Market community store in Sanyuanqiao. This is more than just the source of ingredients for our…
“Is there really nothing else to eat in this world?” “Snowpiercer was way ahead of its time!” Just yesterday, these were the existential questions being asked by netizens after seeing a reporter visiting an American cockroach farm drink a cup of ‘cockroach crunchy coffee’. Imagine that, besides the American cockroach,…
During the Spring Festival at the start of 2025, the theme of our family dinner was AI—specifically, the overnight sensation that was DeepSeek. The younger generation couldn’t stop talking about it. I felt a certain detachment, much as I did when ChatGPT first emerged a couple of years prior. Had…
What happens when an “expert” who has spent 20 years studying agricultural policy decides to roll up his trousers and get into the fields to grow 2.6 mu of rice? Chen Jingjing, a graduate of a prestigious agricultural university and a long-term researcher in rural construction, made a “counter-intuitive” decision…
