Farmers’ markets, solidarity economies, community-supported agriculture, local food systems, and PGS.
Yiyi Farm’s universal red sour soup, made by stir-frying ginger and garlic in lard then simmering with tomatoes and celery, can boil fish, blanch beef, cook noodles, stir-fry vegetables, or become a sour soup hot pot — lifting the flavour and whetting the appetite after Spring Festival’s heavy meat and fish.
Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers Market farmers present New Year’s Recipes, days two to seven. This radish simply needs the skin left on, thick-cut strips, and a dish of soy sauce set beside it — its crisp bite cuts through New Year’s rich, heavy fare.
Xiucai Doufang’s five-step, soybean paste–braised tofu is one of the dishes in the Spring Festival Recipe Collection from Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. Six farm friends each serve one dish made with their own produce, from the second to the seventh day of the Lunar New Year.
Beijing Huairou Snail Farm shares its New Year recipe: slow-braise a free-range rooster with beer and spices, and in about two hours this dish comes together easily at home.
Wu Longlong from Mutongxin Farm personally shares his method for Fragrant Steamed Pork Belly. From the second to the seventh day of the New Year, Foodthink, together with farmers from the Beijing Organic Farmers Market, presents a New Year Recipe Collection – one dish each day.
From the second to the seventh day of the Lunar New Year, Foodthink is teaming up with farmers from Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market to share six New Year recipes made with their own ingredients, helping use up leftovers while adding a new dish to the table each day.
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.
On 7 February, Foodthink’s editorial team takes over the Jishi grocery shop in Sanyuanqiao for 12 hours — with a year-end review, a sharing session on selling produce as a method, a Chinese New Year provisions livestream, and a documentary-and-lamb-broth dinner, in person and online.
Nearly a hundred participants assembled article titles and Cantonese dishes into eight climate science fiction novellas; a documentary probes imported meat’s impact on the pastoral regions around Qinghai Lake; a forum examines extreme weather’s cascading changes to agriculture and the dining table.
