For many young people eating alone, scrolling short videos, following dramas and watching mukbangs can ease boredom, but may also distract them, make them forget their food’s taste, and lengthen meals, leaving them torn between dependence and breaking free.
In some villages in Sichuan, farmers and the public-interest organisation Home Action are trialling low-input, low-pesticide methods that retain local heirloom varieties, helping families eat healthily first and keeping seeds for the community to cope with heat and drought.
In Jianyang, Ya’an and other places in Sichuan, farmers including Yang Xiuyou and non-profit organisation Home Action use no-till cover, heirloom varieties and experience in storing grain to cope with harvest risk in persistent drought, while also sustaining village life for the left-behind elderly.
US health official Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing ‘Make America Healthy Again’. The FDA has had a $400 million budget cut and 3,500 staff cut. Food testing quality control has been paused, and US food safety oversight is again facing difficulties.
Brewer Zhang Kai of Fenyu Brewing and Mars Elephant Lab co-founder Xu Xin bridge brewing and baking through fermentation experiments using the same grain, from inoculating corn with sake koji to brewing beer from leftover bread, and address practical challenges in China’s grain supply chain.
Ecological farmers in Beijing and Hebei have reshaped fields, repaired drainage channels and adjusted crops after consecutive downpours, trying to limit losses while facing added pressure from labour, facilities and public drainage.
Through Foodthink’s Eco-Agricultural Internship Programme, this Gen Z intern spent three months at Lexiangu Community Farm in Shanghai’s Fengxian District, raising seedlings, weeding, repairing a roof, tending sheep and dogs, working at market stalls, and gaining the courage to explore the future.
Zhen Rui, owner of Sohu Farm, Beizhuang town, Miyun, had 450 mu of land washed away, and his investment of nearly 30 million was wiped out overnight. Two colleagues narrowly escaped death, and a weakness in early warning for extreme rainfall was fully exposed.
In a small town in eastern Sichuan, at a modern slaughterhouse park invested in by the author’s aunt, cattle and sheep orders, retail cuts and pre-dawn deliveries make up daily life; customer complaints and workshop smells expose how industrialised slaughter is hidden from everyday life.
From Yunnan’s Red Junglefowl, Guizhou’s high-legged chicken and Little Liangshan Yi chickens, Zou Lei, a PhD student at Minzu University of China, sees that local chicken breeds are fading as industrialised farming, urbanisation and foreign varieties arrive, and food, language and ritual change accordingly.
