Labor in food and farming systems, migrant workers, labor rights, and changes in production-side work.
Peking University Professor Zhang Dandan says flexibility itself is a benefit, but food delivery riders face platform controls like peak-hour online mandates and KPI assessments. Gig work is more an employment model to cut costs and transfer risk than work freely chosen by workers.
Lu Yinghong, a left-behind mother for seven years who studied early childhood education, bends in the polytunnels daily with women in their fifties and sixties uprooted by the peppercorn plunge. The farm offers income without travelling far — but the soil degrades in three to five years, the road ahead uncertain.
After Qinguan, Fuji, wheat and maize, peaches and plums are now in the wheat field again. His father, nearly seventy, has kept switching crops in Liquan, and no one can say how long he will last when the next variety boom comes.
McDonald’s uses price anchoring, shrinking stores and its shared-staff system to cut costs. According to former shift manager Jiang Ke, this efficiency machine still ultimately relies on human on-the-spot judgement as its safety net.
Jiang Ke, who served as a shift manager at McDonald’s for seven months, has experienced the fryer whistles, vacuum-packed shredded lettuce and order screens in the open-plan kitchen, and seen how waiting and complaints when customers collect their meals feed into the store’s score.
A cook flying from Chiang Mai to Shanghai for a pop-up dinner ran straight into Dianping’s rating system: one V8 user’s negative review can knock half a star off overnight, a grey bad-review deletion chain churns in its wake, and the cook at its end can only apologise.
Three Beijing-drifter domestic workers — Suying, Huirong and Qiu Hua — plan a week’s menu for their employers yet cannot say what they themselves like to eat. On days off they stir-fry in Hongyan’s small kitchen for a tableful of sisters, and crouch on bare ground beside the tongzilou, planting Chinese chives and baby bok choy back in the soil.
Yang Xiuying and 70-year-old neighbour Deng Lian enter the hills before dawn, returning with hundreds of jin to peel, boil and dry all day—four to five hundred yielding under twenty. Children’s money is sporadic; social and medical costs top ten thousand yuan a year. She cannot stop.
From “ghost delivery” and farmer-support marketing to sorters on the run, shifting wet markets, and plastic waste, the issues facing workers, merchants, farmers, and the environment beyond platform convenience are often overlooked.
Foodthink screens four films by the shores of Tuanjie Lake, about delivery riders, rice farmers, herders and fermentation artisans. After each screening, join the directors and protagonists for a chat about the labour and cost behind food; before each one, browse the farmers’ market.
