After Xibei’s chain-restaurant incident, takeaway, supermarket and freezer ready meals have put the breath of the wok, prices and the feeling of being deceived back on the table. Small eateries’ fresh stir-frying, international students’ dinners and homemade meals offer another path between convenience and freshness.
Typhoon Huajiasha made landfall on Hailing Island, Yangjiang; Shangchuan Island recorded gusts above Force 17 – Guangdong’s strongest ever at a national-level meteorological station. Fish rafts shattered, citrus and sugarcane flattened; farmers just over ten days from the Mid-Autumn and National Day holiday face near-total wipeout.
Coaches day after day follow the same route along the village’s carefully arranged roads, telling eco stories to inspection groups and tourists; the scorched-black field ridges charred by herbicide beneath the rice paddies are selectively hidden in the display.
From the Miao ancestors’ long migration south and the mountains’ salt scarcity, the piece traces white sour soup’s rice-water fermentation, red sour soup’s evolution through tomatoes and chillies, and the place sour soup holds in marriages, ancestral rites and festivals.
Foodthink’s research shows that rural social organisations need more than emission reduction accounting and risk assessment to build climate resilience. They must tackle livelihood issues such as hollowing out, ageing and water conservancy, and work with agricultural technology departments and grassroots governance.
On Thanksgiving 1953, Swanson & Sons, needing to clear surplus turkeys, packed meat, vegetables and sauce into compartmented aluminium trays and sold them frozen; since then, retort pouches and modified atmosphere packaging have in turn emerged, continually rewriting food’s journey.
Over three months at Xiqing Farm in Zhangziying Town, Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi saw how weeds retain moisture, ants herd aphids, and a water-starved sweet pepper turns to flowering and seeding — the living logic of land and crops behind repetitive labour.
Kouzi layers bayberries, hibiscus, aquatic plants and tuber crops in Villain Valley and pursues self-sufficiency through low-maintenance lazy farming. She also makes jam and juice from the harvest and raises a group of symbiotic ducks.
Britain turned the world into a source of food, weaving the inequalities of class, race and species into a single food system: the famines in Ireland and India, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and industrialised slaughter all sprang from it.
Delivery riders take orders in the rain while facing fines and the risk of accidents. A debate over responsibility among consumers, platforms and workers also asks whether platform gig work has become a safety net for the unemployed.
