Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
After Xibei’s chain-restaurant incident, takeaway, supermarket and freezer ready meals have put the breath of the wok, prices and the feeling of being deceived back on the table. Small eateries’ fresh stir-frying, international students’ dinners and homemade meals offer another path between convenience and freshness.
From rice-water fermentation to tomatoes and chillies in the jar, Guizhou sour soup carries the Miao people’s migration memory amid salt scarcity and a humid climate. It becomes the everyday flavour on festival tables and for people away from home.
After growing beans and running, and experiencing her parents’ final days in the ICU, Grandma Kouzi sees signing a living will to waive cardiopulmonary resuscitation and the use of a ventilator as a way to fight for a natural death.
For many young people eating alone, scrolling short videos, following dramas and watching mukbangs can ease boredom, but may also distract them, make them forget their food’s taste, and lengthen meals, leaving them torn between dependence and breaking free.
Zhang Fulan, a Jieyang native in Chaoshan, recalls her childhood food memories from school-gate sweet potato starch cubes and stationery-shop ice lollies to grandmother’s Pig Trotter Rings and mother’s handmade rice cakes, linking local traditional foods, industrialised snacks and body changes linked to emotional eating.
I am someone who succumbed to pressure; I couldn’t keep playing this game of racing between skyscrapers. Now, I write my story in the hope that as a “failed player” still in flight, I can identify from those past “failures” the things that truly made me feel lonely and depressed,…
Foodthink says “Seeking the tastes of childhood” has become a trending topic over the last few years. The subject of this article, the “White Rabbit” melon, is the very embodiment of that “childhood sweetness” cherished in the memories of the people of Guanzhong. This heirloom variety has been cultivated since…
Foodthink’s Take In the previous edition of our “Eat Well” column, dozens of Foodthink readers shared their “moments they wanted to avoid takeout”. Many expressed their frustration; although there are times they are tired of takeout, the frantic pace of work, a lack of culinary skill, or poor kitchen facilities…
Editor’s Note Few dietary cultures are as deeply defined by religion and embedded in ethnic life as “Halal”. After connecting with Muslim friends from the Northwest, I realised that once they leave their predominantly Muslim communities to work in the South, they have very few affordable Halal dining options beyond…
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…
