Swapping lunch for a reading list today

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For World Book Day on 23 April 2025, Foodthink has compiled a reading list recommended by our editors, authors, and peers. Although these suggestions were gathered independently, they converged instinctively on the most fundamental relationship of human existence: our connection to food, land, and the natural environment.

From Bruno Latour’s exploration of how to reconstruct the political imagination amidst an ecological crisis, to the transformation of the French countryside under the impact of modernisation; from first-hand accounts of the arduous journey of China’s environmental movement, to the complex interaction between the influx of capital into the countryside and rural society; from Tsukasa Abe’s whistleblowing on industrial additives, to warnings about disappearing food diversity and deep reflections on the modern dietary environment—these works together form a multi-angled examination of contemporary food and environmental systems. More importantly, these books remind us that beyond mainstream knowledge systems, there exist equally rich and valuable ways of understanding the world.

We hope these books open new horizons and imaginations for us, allowing us to find the possibility of reconnecting with the land, nature, and one another in these complex times.

《Down to Earth: Politics in the Era of Planetary Catastrophe》

Author: Bruno Latour [France]

Translator: Hu Enhai

Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House | Ye Ren

Published November 2023

《Down to Earth: Politics in the Era of Planetary Catastrophe》 is a slim volume released by French sociologist Bruno Latour during Donald Trump’s first term in 2017. It serves as both a response to Trump’s ascent and the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and as a meditation on ecological politics, the left-right divide, and the conflict and potential synthesis of localisation and globalisation. By the time he passed away in 2022, one wonders if he foresaw Trump’s second election. For those of us who must live through this second term and bear the consequences of his actions, this short book offers inspiration for our strategic approach: how to create a globalisation that benefits both the ecology and the people, while simultaneously safeguarding diverse local identities.

—Tianle (Founding Editor of Foodthink, Organiser of the Beijing Organic Farmers Market)

《Remaking the Countryside: The Decline and Rebirth of French Rural Society after 1945》

Author: Sarah Farmer [USA]

Translator: Ye Zang

Guangxi Normal University Press / Wangmountain

Published November 2024

The countryside is in decline, yet in politics, culture, and consumption, the imagery of the ‘rural’ is repeatedly invoked, even regarded as the root of a nation’s unique character. Yet this imagined countryside drifts further and further away from reality. This is not 21st-century China, but 20th-century France.

The rural landscape of this country consists of more than just wine estates; in the past, it also belonged to the small-scale peasantry. Contrary to popular impression, the state of the French countryside before World War II differed little from the era of the Vendée uprising, with small-scale family labour still largely reliant on animal traction. However, in the post-war era, rapidly developing industries and population migration led to the ‘disappearance of the peasantry’. The hollowed-out villages were filled by heterogeneous practices: modern agriculture powered by tractors; city dwellers buying old houses in the country to convert them into holiday homes; and the utopian communes of leftist youth.

My favourite part is the story of photographer Raymond Depardon in the final chapter. As the son of a farmer, it was only in middle age that he realised the countryside he had once longed to escape was vanishing. He determined to record it with his camera—capturing the pain of the peasantry whose ‘habitat was destroyed, and who could never return to the past’.

—Wang Hao (Editor, Foodthink)

 《In Search of Green China》

Author: Ma Tianjie

Publisher: Polity

Published February 2025

If you care about whether the water you drink and the air you breathe are clean; if you wonder why air quality in the North has improved so markedly over the last decade, or why the government wavered for twenty years over whether to build a hydroelectric dam on a wild, free-flowing river… then In Search of Green China should be on your essential reading list.

This is the best book I have read on China’s contemporary environmental history. With a keen touch, the author weaves together several threads of China’s environmental governance over the past thirty years through a series of representative figures: the photographer who quit his public office to document the pollution of the Mother River; the journalists and scholars who campaigned for the Nu River; the ambitious yet frustrated Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection who sought to promote ‘Green GDP’; the ordinary citizens who flocked to public hearings; and the scientists striving to trace the sources of air pollution… As their fates intersected and inspired one another, the environmental governance tools we now take for granted emerged: the phasing out of outdated production capacity, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), public participation, and environmental inspections. These were hard-won victories achieved by the book’s protagonists during an era when ‘economic development outweighed all else’. Some found fame and success, some saw their careers ruined, and some are no longer with us.

The book consistently asks: what kind of development do we actually need? The interplay between economic growth and environmental protection serves as the two primary lines of tension throughout the text; the author’s key finding is that the success or failure of China’s environmental governance depends on whether these two forces align or diverge. However, the intrinsic importance of nature to human civilisation has yet to be fully internalised within our national consciousness. In this sense, regardless of how successful the construction of an ‘ecological civilisation’ may appear on the surface, the search for a Green China continues.

——Kong Lingyu (Project Director at Foodthink, former environmental journalist)

Food Sovereignty and Ecofeminism

Author: Lionel Astruc [France]

China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing House

Published October 2020

Recently, women in Guinea-Bissau set fire to a facility operated by a Chinese company to resist an environmentally destructive mining project—an act of desperation to defend their land, their homes, their survival, and the dignity of their lives. As a result, these African women from the margins have come into focus in the Chinese media, their angry “fires” drawing a brief moment of attention. This reminds me of the ‘Chipko movement’ that originated in India in the 1970s—similarly, a group of women who had experienced ecological destruction and the loss of their livelihoods rose up and acted with courage.

In this collection of dialogues, Food Sovereignty and Ecofeminism, the author interviews Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, a participant in the Chipko movement. The book allows us to see the experiences of women in Third World countries, distinct from the Western-centric world; here, women are not merely caregivers or victims, but defenders of ecological justice and food sovereignty. From sowing seeds to resistance, from the kitchen to the battlefield, they act with resilience and wisdom on the front lines against capital plunder and ecological collapse. Ecofeminism provides an alternative lens through which to consider ecological issues. If you care about these topics, I encourage you to open this book and witness their actions once more.

——Zhang Liaoshu (Part-time colleague at Foodthink)

Inside and Outside: The Social Foundations of Capital’s Incursion into the Countryside

Author: Xu Zongyang

Social Sciences Academic Press

Published May 2022

As a representative of large-scale farming and agricultural modernisation, the movement of capital into rural areas is seen as a vital force for transforming “traditional” agriculture and the relatively “backward” production of small-scale farmers. This book emphasises that this influx of capital cannot achieve an automatic combination of various elements; its success depends crucially on the process of interaction with rural society. Based on thorough field research, the book offers a paradoxical explanation for the failure of such ventures: to ensure agricultural efficiency, enterprises need to be “isolated” from the local community; however, this “isolation” leads to various social incidents, increasing operating costs and even causing direct losses. Therefore, the right path forward lies in reducing the impact of this “internal-external divide” to integrate with rural society in a way that is both efficient and sustainable, moving from an “external” to an “internal” orientation.

——Zhang Qian (Associate Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Recommended Reading

《Why We Eat (Too Much): The New Science of Appetite》

Author: Andrew Jenkinson [UK]

Translator: Wang Yinjun

Chongqing University Press

Published July 2023

The author is a doctor who has long treated patients with severe obesity. In his view, obesity is a disease that cannot be overcome by willpower alone. He describes calorie-counting diets as a “battle doomed to fail”—it is our genes and dietary environment that make us obese, while dieting can actually cause our appetites to spiral out of control, ultimately achieving the opposite goal of weight gain. The true solution is to reconstruct a healthy dietary system, using a well-functioning negative feedback loop to signal the brain to stop overeating and thereby shift the weight set-point. The author’s advice is simple: cook for yourself, engage in exercise you enjoy, and savour good food. Yet, establishing healthy eating habits is precisely the most difficult step, which prompts a reflection beyond the book: what is it that prevents us from “wasting” our time on the simple act of eating well?

——Dou Dou (Foodthink Author)

Recommended Reading

《The Truth About Food》

Author: Tsukasa Abe [Japan]

Translator: Li Bo

Tianjin Education Press

Published 2008

The author, Tsukasa Abe, was once a star employee at a famous additives company—a “God of Additives” capable of using various chemical compounds with virtuoso skill.

On the occasion of his daughter’s third birthday, he took a rare leave of absence to eat at home. Upon entering, his face darkened with shock, and he shouted at his wife, “Why did you buy this for the child?” He was referring to a plate of meatballs on the table.

Those meatballs were Abe’s own masterpiece: created by taking beef scraps discarded by meat processing plants and skillfully applying over thirty different additives to alter the texture, remove off-odours, enhance the aroma, and improve the colour, effectively turning waste into a commercial product. These affordable meatballs not only generated massive revenue for the additives company but also allowed the processing plants to make a fortune—enough to build a new corporate building. However, he never imagined that they would eventually find their way onto his own dining table and into the mouth of his beloved daughter.

He knew better than anyone in the world what was in those meatballs. Of course, he could guarantee that every single additive was within legal limits, but when dozens of additives work in tandem, even the most robust human metabolic system is bound to fail. What did such a combination and volume mean for a child whose bodily functions were still developing? No one was more horrified than Tsukasa Abe.

Love for one’s child leads to a love for all. Abe resigned from his company and became a food safety educator. 《The Truth About Food》 begins with the story of the beef meatballs that changed his life.

——Kou Zi (Foodthink Author)

Recommended Reading

《Vanishing Foods: Beyond Taste, What Else Will We Lose?》

Author: Dan Saladino [UK]

Translator: Gao Yubing

Wenhui Press

Published December 2023

《Vanishing Foods》 documents the hunger crises following the end of the Second World War and how capital and industrialisation have made our food homogeneous. Usually, “endangered species” refers to plants or animals facing extinction, but in this book, it serves as a reminder of the foods that have already vanished or are on the brink, and the subsequent loss of the nutrition, genetics, and cultural knowledge they carry. For example, the *memangnarang*, a citrus variety known in India as the “fruit of the ghosts”, was traditionally placed on the bodies of the deceased to protect them from evil spirits; today, however, citrus is dominated by sweet mandarins and oranges. Similarly, wild rice is naturally red, but market preferences for cooking have led to its domestication into white rice—a unique variety, the Red-beaked glutinous rice of China, is now carefully preserved by a single farming family in Sichuan.

As our daily diets are increasingly controlled by capitalist systems, and the ingredients we can purchase become uniform and limited regardless of time or place, we see our food-based connection to the environment severed and the climate further destabilised by the reduction of species. To resist the fragility of this system, we must become aware of those nameless food varieties that have been filtered out by the mainstream. In this context, another book, Free Food: Wild Plants and How to Eat Them, becomes essential. The author shares her accumulated knowledge of foraging, teaching us how to rebuild our intimacy with nature through the search for food, and how to sustainably and respectfully gather the rich diversity of wild foods that supermarkets have discarded.

——Zhou Chen (Foodthink Author, PhD Candidate in Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam)

Recommended Reading

《Barbara McClintock: A Singular Devotion》

Author: Evelyn Keller [USA]

Translator: Yang Xi

Yunnan People’s Publishing House

Published July 2024

Barbara McClintock was a scientist who dedicated her entire life to the study of maize. She viewed cells, organisms, and even entire ecosystems as a single, integrated whole, believing that if science ignores this holism, it can only ever provide fragmented truths. Reflecting on the short-sightedness of modern science and technology, she pointed out that humanity often suffers the consequences of attempting to solve problems through a reductionist lens.

In the increasingly fast-paced and hyper-competitive era of molecular biology, McClintock’s approach to research seems almost “luxurious”—she insisted on slow observation, breathing in unison with the life cycle of the maize. She reminds us that true scientific discovery is hidden within complexity and requires patience and insight, yet this scientific spirit is being eroded by competition and utilitarianism. In her time, she foresaw that biology would return to the naturalist tradition and re-embrace the wholeness of life. Her story is more than a reflection on scientific methods and paradigms; it is a profound revelation on how to “listen to nature”.

——Guan Qi (Foodthink Author, Head of Eastern Office, Farmers’ Seed Network)

Recommended Reading

《Nomads of the Altai Mountains: Ecological Environment and Indigenous Knowledge》

Author: Chen Xiangjun

Social Sciences Academic Press

Published September 2017

Drawing on long-term research among the Kazakh people in Fuyun County, Altay region, the author provides a detailed account of the production and lifestyle of Kazakh nomads. For someone like me, encountering nomadic knowledge for the first time, this book shifted a crucial perception: that outside the mainstream of agricultural civilisation, there exists a nomadic civilisation that is equally vital, rich, complete, and steeped in history.

In recent years, the concept of “nomadism” has been romanticised and appropriated, from “digital nomads” to the TV series *To the Wonder*; yet, through these, we cannot see what “nomadism” truly is. We are either obscured by dominant ethnic narratives, lacking a balanced respect for pastoral civilisation and alternative ways of life, or we are accustomed to viewing the development of distant lands through a lens of “economy first”. In this book, from the perspective of a researcher, the author systematically discusses the relationship between nomadic knowledge systems and the grassland ecology against the backdrop of economic development. He emphasises that the development of any region must first respect the local knowledge ecology and its inherent cultural traditions; otherwise, social disorder and ecological imbalance will inevitably follow.

——Wu Yang (Foodthink Author)

Recommended Reading

《The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies》

Author: Marcel Mauss [France]

Translator: Ji Zhe

The Commercial Press

Published 2016

I cannot recall when I first read this book; I only know that I felt the need to read it again to soothe the enduring damage caused by the “poison” of evolutionary theory absorbed through my education since childhood. What question does Mauss seek to answer in The Gift? “In archaic or primitive societies, what laws and rules of interest dictate that receiving a gift creates an obligation to reciprocate? What power resides within the gift that compels the recipient to return it?” The Maori answer is: a spiritual power called “hau”. This book, too, possesses such a spiritual power; I hope more people can feel it.

——Chen Jingjing (Foodthink Author, Head of Tusheng Studio)

Editors: Carrie, Wang Hao, ZX

Poster: ZX

Published by Foodthink