Labor in food and farming systems, migrant workers, labor rights, and changes in production-side work.
I. The Great Australian Egg Shortage For the first time in my life, I found myself unable to afford eggs. This past New Year, my family and I rented an Airbnb in Sydney, Australia, to ring in the new year. Being unfamiliar with the area, we did all our shopping…
From the 55-year-old “Order King” who died suddenly on his delivery scooter to a rider begging online, from Xu Zheng’s Against the Current to Singapore’s Platform Workers Bill — in 2024, delivery riders under algorithmic control became a shared focus of cinema, scholarship and legislation.
Foodthink has compiled a 2025 reading list from the new books on food and agriculture, ecology and sustainability received in 2024 — from delivery riders’ working conditions to the ecological lessons of fungal networks.
CoopCycle, the French delivery cooperative federation, comprises 67 bicycle delivery cooperatives. Riders are paid hourly, can refuse assignments and are not surveilled by algorithms; major decisions are voted on by all cooperatives on a “one person, one vote” basis.
Cracked fingertips, farmhands in their seventies doing all the planting across 20 mu, members unwilling to share a thin harvest – at a community-supported farm in Fengxian, Shanghai, three months of labour brought the organic ideal up against the concrete realities of manpower, seasons, and funding.
In 2019, the fall armyworm swept into Ji County on the North China Plain, leaving farmers to queue anxiously for drone spraying. Once technology extension passed from farmers’ own hands to full takeover by agricultural technology companies, smallholders gradually lost their field skills and grip on production.
Foodthink’s Perspective Since the 1950s, a “Fair Trade” movement has emerged globally. Cheap agricultural products from developing countries are constantly imported into developed nations, yet the vast majority of profits from commodity prices are seized by large capital interests within the trade chain, leaving farmers and labourers with only a…
From 1 January 2025, platform workers in Singapore—including those in food delivery, courier services, and ride-hailing—will receive more comprehensive social protections covering work injuries, retirement, healthcare, and housing. They will also be able to form “Platform Work Associations” to strengthen their collective bargaining power. This is the result of the…
Growing up beside the assembly line and ovens of a small mooncake factory in rural Hunan, I refuse every Mid-Autumn mooncake, reprocessing those cloyingly sweet, scorched memories once more.
Director Liu Taifeng of Another Hopeful Day: riders in debt on day one, programmers locked into appraisals, restaurants forced to inflate reviews – algorithms strap different social strata into the same chariot, and two years on, the industry is still worsening.
