Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
The family tables of the three mothers, Xiaoyunsheng, Lingyu and Xiaojing, stretch from a childhood spent eating only dumpling wrappers to teenage “extra meals” and a rice-ball meltdown, tying together the pressures of motherhood, women’s labour and self-identity.
Young people from different cities share their eating experiences and reflections on takeaway, dianzi zhacai, plastic packaging, wet market, and fermentation and fermented foods.
Shuer’s family returned from Wenzhou to Wutong Village, Zhangjia Township, Weiyuan County, Sichuan, for the Spring Festival. There, market visits, fishing and picking pea shoots, with pork, crucian carp and seasonal vegetables, made up a rural dining table where food is both plentiful and scarce.
Zheng Yuyang’s mother returned to a village with only seven or eight households and, in the old house, saw the crockery cupboard and pickled-cabbage jar, weeping. In Beijing, he made his first bucket of pickled cabbage, trying to reconnect Northeast’s daily life with city life.
Xiao Jing, Yu Yang and Li Ye, three heavy users of digital mealtime content, discuss whether watching it while eating can ease loneliness. Research teams found this way of eating increases total caloric intake by 15% and may cause gastrointestinal dysfunction, indigestion and nutritional imbalances.
The Ujimqin sheep from Dulan’s herder family in Harigaobi, East Ujimqin Banner, graze nomadically through all four seasons. Boiled with only water and salt until soft and yielding, they are lightly gamy, fresh and tender — the true flavour of the grassland.
Yiyi Farm stir-fries ginger and garlic in lard until fragrant, then adds tomato, celery and other ingredients to simmer a versatile red sour soup. It can be used to cook fish, blanch beef, make noodles, stir-fry vegetables, or make a sour soup hotpot, refreshing the palate after Spring Festival’s hearty fish and meat.
Farmers at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market serve home-grown white radish or green radish, washed and left unpeeled, cut into finger-thick strips, and dipped in a little soy sauce—refreshing, crisp and sweet.
This dish from Xiucai Doufang braises a piece of tofu with a name in yellow soybean paste, light soy sauce and half a bowl of water for three minutes, reducing the sauce. It is one of the farm friends’ New Year dishes launched by Foodthink together with Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market.
Beijing Huairou Snail Farm shares a New Year dish recipe: slow-cooked free-range rooster with beer and spices, easy to make at home in about two hours.
