Using Shared Meals to Reconnect City Dwellers with Human Warmth and Nature | Sister Yiguo’s Little Table
Editor’s Note
Offering an alternative to eating takeaways alone, The Little Dining Table provides a healthier, more eco-friendly, and warmer shared-dining experience. Amid the current economic downturn, these meal partners pool their resources to buy directly from farmers, creating a cooperative link between producers and consumers that benefits everyone. Through this initiative, Xia Lili hopes to guide more people in building a more resilient support network for everyday life.
This small-scale community kitchen is the culmination of Xia Lili’s lifelong journey of “understanding food,” and stands as one woman’s active participation in societal development—her attempt to find and implement positive change within it.
For her knack of whipping up all sorts of delightful dishes using just a single pot, friends have dubbed Xia Lili“Sister Yiguo”. She is also a nature educator and a researcher and practitioner in community building. With a love for cooking since childhood, she has always been passionate about fostering a sustainable relationship between “people, food, and nature.” In another capacity, she is a writer who previously penned the “Solar Terms Table” column for Foodthink. From now on, she will be evolving this series into “Sister Yiguo’s Little Dining Table,” unfolding a series of vivid stories centred around the diners, cooks, farmers, and food that make up this initiative.
As the inaugural piece in the “Sister Yiguo’s Little Dining Table” column, this article weaves past and present together as Sister Yiguo gently unfolds her deeper reflections on the project.
Life in the city often blurs the shifts in daylight, making the passage of time feel somewhat hazy. Fortunately, I now live in the Yulin and Fangcao neighbourhoods of Chengdu—an area of older residential blocks situated between the first and second ring roads on the city’s southern fringe. As a focal point for community building and urban regeneration in Chengdu, it’s a place where I can sense the changing seasons by observing the local flora and visiting the monthly Chengdu lifestyle markets.
Since starting The Little Dining Table, I visit the market every month to shop for ingredients with my meal partners. This allows me to catch up with the farmers in person, save on delivery costs, and avoid the waste of labour and resources that comes with courier services.
The rain this year in Chengdu has been remarkably considerate — falling intermittently since Guyu (Grain Rain), allowing crops to grow steadily and ripen properly, while gently coaxing the mature fruit to leave the branches. The loquats on the tree beside the Yulin kindergarten wall have drunk their fill over the past few days; their skins are beginning to split, and the fruit is dropping to the ground one after another.
I often wonder how wonderful it would be if the kindergarten could make the most of these loquat trees year-round, taking the children out to observe, pick, and learn practical skills such as making preserves or preparing a fresh salad.
Nature education should start with our immediate surroundings; hands-on learning must be connected to daily life. This is my conviction, and it shapes my work.
I. “Growing up rooted in nature and the warmth of human connection”
Looking back, I feel truly fortunate. In an era where agricultural production is often dominated by intensive techniques and synthetic additives, my child has been able to grow up at his own pace, nourished by food cultivated in an eco-friendly manner by a community of small-scale ecological farmers. He has visited numerous farms, even trading his labour for food and lodging on a few, and has spent his first decade familiarising himself with the rhythms of agricultural life and the daily routines of these farming friends.
Those ten years have shaped him into a young food lover with a curious palate and a clear sense of what he enjoys. When dining out, he deliberately orders dishes that are unusual or hard to come by. At the fresh market, he always asks about the origin of the produce. And on the rare occasions we visit a supermarket for snacks, he makes a point of reading the ingredient labels.
Raising my child immersed in nature and genuine human connection was a hope I first nurtured during my pregnancy. Seeing it come to fruition is something I deeply cherish. I am grateful to the internet for connecting me with this local community of farmers and organisations dedicated to thoughtful eating. This reality also stands on the shoulders of these farmers’ steadfast commitment to the land, and is sustained by the mutual encouragement and unwavering support I have received from fellow practitioners of symbiotic ecological agriculture throughout this journey.
The sight of those golden loquats is irresistibly tempting, bringing back memories of the Sushe courtyard where I once stayed in Mingyue Village. There, living as neighbours to the loquat trees, we embraced the ethos Yumi Hayakawa captures in 耕食生活: “rather than living by our own human clock, we choose to structure our days around the rhythms of the plants.”
During the second year of sharing that small courtyard with the loquat trees, when the harvest was particularly abundant, I gathered a few children from the village into my kitchen to prepare a proper loquat feast.
I still remember that day: the children arrived at the little courtyard at the arranged time, used their fruit pickers to harvest from the trees, and washed the harvest in a basin. They peeled and pitted the fruit, shredded the flesh, layered it with rock sugar in jars, and sealed them tight.
That jar of candied loquats has travelled with me ever since, from the original little courtyard to Le Mao’s Earth Kitchen. Part keepsake with a special purpose, part vibrant decoration, it has always held pride of place on the kitchen prep table.
I’ve always been loath to use them up, reserving just a small spoonful on rare occasions to lift the flavour of a red-braised pork belly.
Years have gone by since then. Some of the children who came to take part in the day’s work have now moved on to high school or university, leaving Mingyue Village to explore the wider world. Yet the laughter they left behind in that courtyard during their childhood, along with the loquats themselves, lives on forever within that small glass jar on the kitchen counter.
That same year, we planted mint and lemon balm in the courtyard. Just pluck a few leaves and scatter them over the loquat flesh we had prepared with the children, add a handful of freshly picked raspberries or mulberries, perhaps a scattering of nuts, give it all a gentle toss, and you have a summer fruit salad that delights both adults and children alike.
As time passes and circumstances change, my child has grown older, and we now live a hundred kilometres apart. My interest in making such snacks and treats has naturally faded.Now that I’ve set up a small shared dining table, what I ponder each workday has shifted to deciding what to serve the fellow diners who gather at the table.
Part Two: The Inspiration – Choosing Meals Beyond Takeaway
I hope to use food as a medium to help more parents shift their educational focus towards daily life, to understand the local environment through seasonal produce, and to preserve regional culture within the rhythm of everyday meals. I was delighted to see that these sessions were warmly welcomed by many urban families, with several groups running over weekends and throughout winter and summer holidays.
The adults and children I meet at each event thoroughly enjoy wandering through the vegetable markets, and they are just as keen to eat at the Chengdu Lifestyle Market’s office on Yulin North Street. Vegetables grown by our farming partners in cleaner soil using ecological methods simply carry a deeper flavour and are naturally more nutritious than the standard commercial crops on supermarket shelves. Even children who are usually repeatedly urged to eat at home will often lick their lips and happily ask for second helpings.
Whenever I see the joy and contentment on the children’s faces, I feel compelled to do even more. I want to help more young people understand where their everyday food comes from, grasp the true importance of seasonal eating, discover why our region has such a rich heritage of fermented foods, and recognise the health and environmental benefits of buying vegetables directly from our farming partners…
Alongside running my nature writing studio, I became involved in the day-to-day operations of a local bookshop. For a period, I was scheduled to cover a two-day shift there each week. Through this routine, I noticed that the shop owners and staff along that street relied on takeaway food for almost every lunch and dinner.
I was somewhat concerned for their health, and I also felt that the sheer volume of packaging waste generated by takeaway meals was highly unsustainable.
After bringing homemade meals to the bookshop staff a few times, the idea for a small community dining table began to take shape. The bookshop’s storage room had once been a private restaurant, so all the pots, pans, and crockery were already in place. I simply needed to bring together fellow shop owners in the neighbourhood to pool funds and purchase vegetables directly from our farming partners. I would take care of the prep and cooking, offering those who had previously relied on takeaways the chance to enjoy clean, wholesome home-cooked food, while simultaneously providing a modest boost to the farmers’ sales. As for myself, the project would not only bridge producers and consumers but also allow me to hone my culinary skills and reduce living costs through a work-for-meals arrangement.
No sooner had the idea formed than I began mapping out the structure of the Little Dining Table in my mind. Whose rice and whole grains should I buy? Who should I order vegetable boxes from? The market only operates once a month, which works well for bulk-buying staples, grains, and root vegetables that store easily, but how would I source leafy greens and melons for daily meals? Should I also share this latest lifestyle experiment with everyone on our public account?
However, reality soon intervened. After the Spring Festival, the bookstore made some operational adjustments, meaning I no longer needed to be on duty. The storage room was also about to be sublet. For a while, the Rainbow Street Little Dining Table existed only as a concept, circling in my mind.
That route was blocked, but I refused to give up.
Three: Gathering the Dining Companions
The previous Spring Festival, I was invited to the Ya’an mountains to consult for a nature camp, which is where I first met Ms Jiang. During a break, as we stretched in the sunshine and chatted about wellbeing, she demonstrated proper diaphragmatic breathing—a moment that left a lasting impression on me.
Having run a café, worked at a nature camp, and explored therapeutic practices like body movement, Ms Jiang already appreciated the restorative power of ecological farming, wholesome food, and regular routines. When I mentioned the Little Dining Table plan, she found my ideas perfectly aligned with her own. Delighted, she immediately offered to become my flatmate.
Sharing a flat and pooling our food shopping and cooking would not only strengthen our partnership and ease utility costs, but, more importantly, the Little Dining Table would free her from the daily dilemma of wondering what to cook, giving her more time to pursue her interests.
With our partnership sealed, I went downstairs to introduce my new flatmate to the siblings who run the plant shop, letting them know the Little Dining Table was now a reality and inviting them to join. They, too, were struggling with daily meals and welcomed the idea. Once I explained the vision behind the table, we settled on a daily collection time and an affordable monthly contribution to cover costs. And so, trial version 1.0 of the Little Dining Table went live.
Now, I hope to use shared meals as a way to help our dining companions truly get to know their food. Once again, I am drawing on the radius of my everyday life to gather local companions into a learning community. Through the Little Dining Table, I aim to forge new connections between producers and consumers, and I look forward to discovering fresh ways to live a beautiful life, surrounded by farmers and dining companions alike.
