Social worker He Siqi spent a month as a picker at JD Qixian—real-time PDA countdowns, monitoring-screen pressure, fines for mistakes. Behind “30-minute delivery” are bodies sprinting without rest between shelves.
Harvesters mired in mud, cobs moulded overnight, good grain at just 0.3 yuan a jin — after drought gave way to waterlogging, farmers in six Hebei and Henan counties have lost ground at every stage, while drying towers and insurance remain out of reach for most farms.
No weather allowance, and fines for not clocking in – the platform’s “tiered reward” scheme pushes risk onto riders. On downpour days there is no circuit breaker; the city’s convenience never pauses, only a person’s safety does.
IPES-FOOD’s report Fuel to Fork dissects how the food system consumes at least 15% of the world’s fossil fuels—from nitrogen fertiliser in the fields and ultra-processed foods and plastic in factories, to supermarket refrigerated cabinets and household stoves—and offers eight decoupling recommendations.
Jianning joins Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, picking blueberries, corn, and lychees at Yinlin Farm in Conghua, Guangzhou, observing chickens, birds, black goats, and villagers at work, and sensing the living connection between food and the land.
Disaster relief worker Hao Nan led disaster relief organisation Zhuoming’s team back to the Miyun and Xinglong disaster areas to reconstruct how abnormal mountain floods formed and how the grassroots judged evacuation timing. Grassroots disaster prevention and reduction still lack funding, staff and technical calculations.
Kouzi purified domestic wastewater in Wuren Valley using banana plants and water lilies, battled cogon grass for four years, cultivated humus from barren, compacted wasteland, and realised a self-sufficient way of living that thrives alongside the land.
From the rice fields of the Northeast to Hainan’s orchards, cross-region drone pilot Brother Yang, drone-buying farmer Zhao Mingliang, and others are facing falling spray unit prices, pesticide damage disputes and occupational illness risks for which compensation is hard to claim.
Nearly twenty readers share stories of success and failure from their pickle jars, starter cultures, and bran beds – from Guizhou’s White sour soup to Shanxi’s tousu, Kunming’s aubergine zhā to Hunan’s chopped chillies – local character and human warmth, pickled into flavour.
SiLi in Yunnan promotes ridge-and-furrow irrigation reduced-water rice across Kunming, Honghe and Pu’er, partnering from county agricultural technology stations to Hani terrace farmers. But along the way, farming friends discuss tillering, yield and how deep to dig a well—not emission reduction.