2026: Free Your Thinking, Call Staple Food Down Unbound by Convention | Grandma Kouzi
Looking back on 2025, it opened as a year of loss—I said goodbye to Mum. Back at Villain’s Valley, I was greeted by harvests of every kind, starting with rapeseed in the spring: forty or fifty jin, yielding more cooking oil than I could possibly get through in a year. This year brought over a hundred pumpkins, over a hundred jin of assorted beans, over a hundred jin of various grains, over a hundred jin of peanuts, and over a hundred jin of corn—nearly complete food self-sufficiency; the only thing I still buy is salt……
Today, let’s talk about the food question that weighs on everyone’s mind—namely the staple food I simply can’t do without, day after day.
I. Pumpkin as Staple Food
A foodie eats in the moment, taking life as it comes. Not long ago, corn had a bumper crop and it was cobs for every meal, all day, every day. Now the wheel of fortune has swung round to pumpkins, and frankly, the situation is grave—a sweet burden: I simply cannot eat them all.
Pumpkins grown old and fully ripe on the vine are no problem. Old pumpkins that have weathered frost keep extraordinarily well—right through into 2026—hanging overhead along the walkway in and out of the courtyard, a head-bonking view in my daily landscape. The trouble is bugs. Fruit flies sting them and they commit “pumpkin suicide”; too many half-ripe, half-old pumpkins throw themselves off the vine. And once the eggs hatch, rot starts from the inside out, so they must be eaten before it takes hold.
In the past I mainly used pumpkins in porridge, steamed them, or made pumpkin soy milk—limited use either way, and you had to be choosy. Only truly old pumpkins are sweet, and you had to pick the right variety: watery ones simply don’t taste right. It’s just that Fujian is so wet and humid—”when the orange crosses the Huai, it turns to bitter trifoliate”—and many a variety that should be gloriously starchy and sweet grown up north comes out watery in my plot. Sweet and floury-starchy in the same pumpkin is beyond me, and I’m caught in a bind: I love them, but they don’t taste right.
Recently I invented a new way to eat them: slice the pumpkin thick (under 5 mm and they burn; over 10 mm and they won’t cook through), pop them in the air fryer, 180°C, 30 minutes, flipping halfway through. This method doesn’t care about variety or wateriness—roasting drives off moisture and concentrates the sweetness, so the skin comes out springy and the flesh soft and floury, and the taste absolutely takes off.
Pumpkin has even been promoted to staple food. Today’s lunch for me: one tray of roasted pumpkin, two salted duck eggs, and a pot of fresh flower-and-vegetable soup. The flowers are rose of Sharon, roselle and okra flower; the vegetables are luffa, calabash and tender young mulberry leaves; a few soaked peanuts and some frozen-cooked yellow beans go in too. A dozen-plus ingredients in a riot of colour, ticking every box for a Mediterranean diet. The broth base is turmeric stock—a Villain’s Valley classic pre-made soup. The main ingredient is turmeric; the rest, in descending order, are day lily, cherry tomatoes, spring onion, ginger, garlic, salt, Litsea cubeba and black pepper, simmered gently for over two hours to reduce, then portioned and frozen. Pull a pack out whenever you fancy it, and in five minutes you’ve got a proper, long-simmered soup.
I’ve been on about pumpkins for a while now, but only because they’re my staple food at present. What, pumpkin counts as staple food?
What should staple food look like? Why can’t pumpkin be staple food?
II. Staple Food, Evolving with the Times
We are used to thinking of carbohydrate-rich grain crops as staple food—rice and steamed buns, which mainly meet the need for energy. In the hunter-gatherer era, people burned enormous energy simply to stay alive, and populations that could consume calorie-dense staples were more likely to prevail in the struggle for survival. Across millennia of evolution, so long as the driving force was human muscle, the more staple food the better and the more refined the better; only when that ran short did coarse wholegrains get a look-in, and when even that fell short, you wore that gaunt, pinched look.
I was born in the 1960s and knew real hunger. Back in primary school, half of our ration-book quota was coarse grain; having nothing but refined grain at every meal was a luxury beyond dreaming. When people met then, ‘You’ve put on weight!’ was a compliment—Lu Xun’s stories have scenes just like that. We all know the compliment has since shifted to ‘You’ve slimmed down.’
In times of scarcity, energy came first. In times of plenty, nutrition takes priority. In an era that worships slimness, refined carbohydrates and refined fats have become a “sugar-and-fat bomb” threatening modern health. The shift from energy-first to nutrition-first calls for more protein, micronutrients and dietary fibre. By those standards, meat, eggs and dairy are straight-A students. In the fitness world, eating seven or eight eggs a day is nothing unusual—they’ve practically become a staple food. The diet of Italian supercentenarian Emma Morano barely changed over nearly a century: three eggs for breakfast, fried eggs for lunch, chicken for dinner. She lived to 117, and her regimen has been dubbed “the chicken diet” or “the egg diet”. Eggs and chicken—plainly, her staple food.
Maize, sweet potatoes, potatoes and eggs can be staple food—and so can pumpkin. Pumpkin is a quality source of carbohydrate and supplies most of my daily energy. It has more protein than rice or wheat flour and is rich in potassium, calcium and magnesium. Absolutely a qualified staple food and a treasure trove in one.
Staple food at Villain’s Valley follows no fixed rule. Generally it’s what’s available, eating what’s local and what’s in season—letting my palate follow the harvest. In pumpkin season, I roast pumpkin every day; in corn season, it’s boiled corn. My staple list is likely to gain tempeh made from mixed beans. The bean harvest in 2025 was good: over a dozen legume crops in total. Setting aside the fresh-eaten ones—French beans, long beans, broad beans, mangetout, winged beans—the ones I can store include soya beans, green peas, black beans (yellow-centred and green-centred), edamame, white kidney beans, purple kidney beans, yellow beans and more. Excluding all the ones I’ve eaten fresh from the pod, a few days ago I dried and weighed the rest, and they came to over a hundred jin. After years of trial and error, I finally learned to make tempeh at home, but there were never enough beans. At most, in a good year I’d harvest thirty jin of soya and black beans—barely an ounce a day—so I’d ration even the beans for soy milk. Now I’ve got three ounces a day, and at last I can claim tempeh freedom: dig in, call it ‘staple food.’ I needn’t belabour the benefits of tempeh—say too much and I’ll just sound like I’m humble-bragging, fair to get smacked for.
III. How Staple Food Reaches the Table
To the children of that era in America, spinach was the tin on the supermarket shelf. Every vegetable was the same. In truth, we’ve not been much different: many children don’t even know how steamed buns come from wheat.
Under the twin engines of industrialised production and global distribution, staple foods—ever more refined at source—grew ever more pre-made and commodified. Fifty or sixty years ago, every household in my small hometown bought flour and kneaded, shaped and steamed their own buns. Now most people just buy finished buns—most from street stalls and steaming little bun workshops, the rest from supermarket freezers or online shopping.
In Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, the average American intake of these three ingredients is shown to be double the recommended level, and Chinese intakes today match or exceed that. These excesses are not coming from the condiment bottles on the dinner table—they come primarily from the processed-food industry, a trillion-dollar-a-year empire of ready-to-eat products. Crisps, sweets, pastries, milk tea, ever-shifting sweetened drinks… more additives mean more profit, more flavour, and more health problems.
American food advertising around the Second World War was full of ‘women’s liberation’ narratives: just a pair of scissors, a steamer or a microwave, and a grand feast for the whole family, easy as pie. The twentieth century also gave us the standard modern kitchen: fridges all much the same, stocking products and semi-finished goods all much the same. Modernity standardised the kitchen; industrialisation conquered the table.
Industrialised production and global distribution are the trend, and irreversible. Yet in this age of abundance, a modern person this clever is bound to find a way to live well with the times, making the best of progress.
Thanks to the complete manufacturing supply chain of a true production powerhouse, home rice mills, oil presses and flour grinders are all affordable and easy to get online. With these in hand, the wheat, paddy and peanuts and rapeseed I harvest at Villain’s Valley can all be stored whole. I only process what I need, as and when. My shelf life isn’t two years, or even two months—perhaps not even two weeks. Zero additives, no fear of spoilage.
By now some of you are surely rolling your eyes and calling me a humble-bragger. But I haven’t slaved over all this typing just to show off and go looking for a smack—what I want to say is: you can do this too.
IV. The Form of Staple Food
Smart as the modern mind is, we need only set our thinking free and call staple food down in every form, unbound by convention.
Online shopping is so highly developed now—wonderful quality at bargain prices—that you can buy all sorts of pre-made products, but also all sorts of food in its whole, original form. I have always held that being additive-free matters more than being organic: a whole pumpkin, say, or raw soya beans and corn still on the cob. I keep the truly ripe, fully old pumpkins to eat slowly, and dry off whatever corn I cannot eat right away. Every day, when I make pumpkin soy milk, I break off a handful of corn kernels—the nutritional balance works better and absorbs more easily, plus it adds aroma and body.
We all know the skin of a pumpkin packs more nutrition than the flesh, but if it is too old it turns woody and inedible. Special thanks to the high-speed blender spinning at over thirty thousand revolutions a minute. Now I simply toss everything in and hit the button—pumpkin skin, pulp, and seeds included—and out comes smooth, silky pumpkin soy milk with ease.
Back in the agricultural era, you would steam the pumpkin first, then grind it into a paste and filter, busting yourself for half the day only to end up with a coarser result—and the skin and seeds of an old pumpkin would all end up in the dregs. But with a high-speed blender, it is a flick of the wrist.
Take, for another example, the air-fryer roasted pumpkin I mentioned at the top of this piece—another perk exclusive to modern living. I built earth ovens at both Yilan and Villain’s Valley (at Yilan, a traditional European black oven; at Villain’s Valley, a rocket-stove white oven). Oven-roasted is lovely, of course, but getting the fire going and the temperature up is a colossal hassle—all that fuss just for a bite of roast pumpkin. Switching to an oven or air fryer is a flick of the wrist too—well, two flicks, since you need to flip halfway.
Everyone knows brown rice is nutritious, but the texture has turned away more people than I can count. I once tried sprouted brown rice—the texture completely trumps white rice, though it is a bit of a fuss to prepare. These days there are rice cookers that automate the whole “sprouted brown rice” process, available online, ranging from several thousand yuan for Japanese-made models to a few hundred for home-grown ones. I have not tried either, partly because I do not eat much rice anyway, and partly because a true foodie welcomes the fuss in the kitchen and finds joy in it.
When progress delivers convenient online shopping and a full arsenal of small kitchen appliances, you can reconnect the land to the table and neatly sidestep all the pitfalls that industrialised production and global distribution bring.
Finally, to answer the question I get asked all the time: what if you do not want a pile of kitchen gadgets—can you just buy semi-finished products and pour-and-go?
Yes, but there is one non-negotiable condition: the ingredient list must be clean. Many of the pour-and-go semi-finished products on the market today are loaded with additives. Soya milk powders often contain added sugar, dextrin, even trans fats. In those rich, instant cereal sachets, the oats are just a fig leaf—the real stars are maltodextrin, made by saccharifying corn starch, and non-dairy creamer packed with trans fats, plus synthetic flavouring. Nothing but science and chemical wizardry. The pour-and-go instant-food aisle is a rabbit hole too deep for me; I keep well clear of the whole lot.
So, in 2026, how are you going to launch your own staple food revolution?
All photographs taken by the author
Editor: Xiaodan