Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
Qilin melons at eight mao a jin, scholar’s curios from every dynasty (authenticity not guaranteed) — at Shahe Grand Fair in Changping, Zhong Shuru stumbles on a bustle where low prices and absurdity coexist, and shows young people how to turn wet-market thrills into know-how through fieldwork methods.
Reader stories gathered by Foodthink – from Shaanxi sāozǐ noodles to Chaoshan procession feasts, from neighbours pitching in to pre-made dishes on the table – serve up memories and questions from every corner of the country on this grand banquet table.
Shu’er, diagnosed with autism at five, has spent ten years at the wet market with her mother—first carried to dodge stray dogs, then independently targeting a stall for pork belly. This noisy market is her daily classroom for maintaining social functioning and practising getting along with others.
Xu Yunyian, fifty, runs a seafood and dried goods shop at Shuangjingtou wet market – no online store, no podcast. Retired elderly catching the early market and Chinese New Year stockpiling keep a family of four going; her younger son grew up right in this lane.
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.
Five years ago, Kouzi broke raw ground from scratch and hand-built a self-sufficient one-person farm; her health indicators are now better than they were twenty years ago. This past year, she has still been fighting a lawsuit over fabrications generated by Baidu AI.
From wedding banquets and longevity banquets to college admission banquets and funeral meals, the shared table holds local produce and life milestones; fill in the questionnaire to share your hometown banquet fare, wedding and funeral memories, hosting experiences, or feelings about how banquets are changing.
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.
Foodthink gathered readers’ kitchen items in use for ten to forty years: a cast-iron pot through many house moves, a Jianshui purple stoneware steam pot from mum to Japan, an enamel cup thirty-three years on since primary school military training, and pickle mother brine from Wushan to Chengdu.
Social work volunteer Meng Fang goes to the market with friends and brings back hemp seed, sour meat and local homemade liquor, then enters the White-Pants Yao Ecomuseum to see golden-silk silkworms, yarn-running and cloth-dyeing; traditional life continues in these everyday routines.
