Globalisation or Localisation? A Dialogue Between Documentary Filmmakers and Food Systems Scholars

The award-winning documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture will be screened this Friday (12 June 2026) at the Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University.

The documentary’s director and crew trace the paths of imported beef and lamb alongside local yaks and Tibetan sheep. Starting from the wholesale and retail markets in Xining, they travel to the street markets, feedlots, and slaughterhouses of Gonghe County, then follow the cattle traders to Qinghai Lake, circling its entire shore. There, they interview herders from various ethnic groups across the surrounding pastoral areas, seeking to understand the impact that the sustained fall in local livestock prices and the flood of imported frozen meat into the market have had on herders’ livelihoods and ways of life.

When the herders of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are already feeling the shock of agricultural produce from distant Brazil, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand, how should we understand the food on our plates?

◉ The flock of Nianga, one of the subjects of Whose Table, Whose Pasture. Photo: Jiao Xiaofang

◉ Revisiting the community is an important part of community film. In 2025, Jiao Xiaofang returned to the filming location to screen Whose Table, Whose Pasture for the shepherds. Photo: Jiao Xiaofang

This Friday (12 June), 15:30–17:30, Foodthink will screen the documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture at Chengjun Yuan, Zijingang West Campus, Zhejiang University, Building 8, 10th Floor, North Reading Room. Friends in Hangzhou are warmly invited to attend and watch together.

Li Jingsong: Professor, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

Zhou Mujun: Tenured associate professor, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

Sun Ruihua: Doctoral candidate, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University

Chang Tianle: Founding editor of Foodthink (the documentary’s producer)

 – Film Synopsis – 

Whose Table, Whose Pasture is an investigative documentary. Supported by Foodthink’s Lianhe Creative Programme, the director ventured deep into the pastoral areas around Qinghai Lake, documenting the impact brought about by the large volumes of imported frozen beef and lamb entering local markets.

By visiting frozen wholesale markets and cold-chain warehouses in Xining, and filming local herder families, butchers’ shops, and feedlots, the documentary gives a candid account of how imported meat, with its low-price advantage, has undercut local beef and lamb. This has led directly to a sharp fall in the purchase prices of herders’ livestock, shrinking incomes and mounting difficulty with loan repayments, while local meat traders are left with razor-thin margins and dwindling business.

The camera delves into the imported beef and lamb markets around Qinghai Lake, confronting a harsh reality: in the globalised meat supply chain, who enjoys the low prices, and who bears the cost?

Jiao Xiaofang: Documentary director and researcher in visual anthropology, with a long-standing focus on local knowledge, ecological ethics, and women’s experiences in western China and the coastal regions of Southeast Asia. Her work combines ethnographic observation with poetic expression, exploring the relationship between people and nature and the emotional landscapes of everyday life. Her documentary Whose Table, Whose Pasture (2025) was selected for the fifth World Nomadic Film Festival and the sixth China Ethnographic Documentary Film Festival.

Qiongwu Danzeng | Tibetan documentary maker and community activist, long committed to ecological conservation and visual education on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Formerly coordinator of the Tibetan programme at “Village Eye” in Yunnan and regional representative at the Alxa SEE Foundation’s Sanjiangyuan Project Centre, he now leads the “Human-Bear Conflict” project at the Xuejing Ecological Education, Outreach and Research Centre, Qinghai Province. Over the past decade, he has promoted herders’ video training and community ecology projects in areas such as Yushu and Aba, supporting herders in using video to document their own environment and culture. His work spans visual media, ecology, and public education, dedicated to building understanding and coexistence between people and nature.

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