Labor in food and farming systems, migrant workers, labor rights, and changes in production-side work.
Pickers and delivery riders at Xiaoxiang, Hema, JD Qixian, and Pupu describe the three-minute limit, piece-rate pay, and physical toll in the comment section. Consumers respond with empathy, off-peak ordering, and reduced reliance, as the dialogue shifts from personal guilt to questioning platform algorithms and industry competition.
On the hillsides of Tongchuan, the 110 mu of land Hongxia and her husband farmed under verbal agreements is being claimed back, mu by mu, by relatives who have returned home — and their 150,000 yuan in farm machinery has become a sunk cost they cannot shake.
At Xiaoxiang Supermarket, pickers climb shelves, enter cold rooms, and scan items one by one under algorithmic timing and piece-rate pay. Mis-picked and missed items are an unavoidable structural problem of “speedism”—not individual negligence.
In northern Anhui, old combines are giving way to new machines with large grain tanks and air conditioning. Bag-catchers, fertiliser-spreaders and pesticide-sprayers are losing their work one after another, yet smart agricultural machinery, at its high price, remains further from small farmers.
In Lanhe Town, Nansha, black-skin sugarcane prices have fallen from 99 yuan per dan to a low of 5 yuan; clearing a mu for free means a loss of over 6,000 yuan. After “non-grain conversion” campaigns cleared out bananas, 30 years of continuous cropping leaves only one crop.
The northern girl growing sugarcane, the blogger laughed at by farmers, the tea science specialist who chats with ride-hailing drivers about rural life, the entomology PhD who calls herself a primary school student in the field — their passion for crops is real, but even they cannot say for sure whether what university teaches will take root in real farming.
Former McDonald’s shift manager Jiang Ke recounts seven months of kitchen daily life: the beeping of constant-temperature fryers, a scheduling system that slices every movement into fragments, and the repeated tug-of-war between efficiency and human feeling in an open kitchen.
At Jishi, an eco-organic vegetable shop in Beijing, Foodthink’s eight members transformed from consumers into shop staff for 12 nonstop hours—identifying vegetables, packing, live-streaming, washing lamb broth bowls—and saw how selling vegetables ripples through shop service, supply chains, and domestic labour.
Former Caixin assistant editor-in-chief Huang Chen and two Foodthink colleagues stock shelves, sort produce, and serve customers at the Jishi grocery, discussing how food spaces reknit scattered city-dwellers after shifting from data narratives to concrete labour.
A strike by over 40,000 riders failed to paralyse New Year’s deliveries, and Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal even mocked the riders on X. Indian riders working roughly 15 hours a day with no contracts are being organised by newly formed worker associations, fighting for safety and income protections.
