Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
Delicious chocolate chip biscuits are high-fat traps that trigger a “cycle of fear”, dragging us into one nightmare after another, saturated in dread; the “crunch” of crisps is a crisp outlet for suppressed anger, providing a hollow sense of security; sugar-free cola is a “happy liar”, like a false perfect…
The eldest sister in Chexu Village on the Jinsha River says: “Everything is my own, except the iron wok.” A filling-less mooncake holds a year of farm work—wheat, oil, bees, waiting for roses and gardenias to bloom in turn, then a slow bake at the open hearth.
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.
Xia Lili and her son Lemao savour a rare summer crop of old-variety yellow peas from Jinzi’s one-person farm in Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture, with simple pea rice recipes for summer and winter.
As a foodie, I don’t eat meat, but I cannot live without beans—soybeans, mung beans, red beans, black beans, and chickpeas. Although I avoid buying from shops as much as possible and try to eat what I grow myself, the consumption of soy products at Evil Person Valley has always…
I. Returning to the Countryside: Connecting with Pengcheng Natural Farm I grew up in a Hakka village in eastern Guangdong, and as a child, I often longed for the world beyond. In 2015, I finally made it to the big city of Guangzhou for my studies; I have lived, worked,…
Editor’s Note In the previous instalment of this column, Sister Yiguo showed us how she uses her ‘Little Dining Table’ in the city to provide her friends with wholesome, delicious meals. Even more dedicated than her is the producer of the rice served at that table—Chen Ying, the owner of…
A tanker truck carrying a mix of mineral and edible oil has suddenly put oil in the spotlight. People are wondering how to ensure the safety of their vegetable oil; but as a foodie, my question is different: do we actually need refined vegetable oil at all? I. A History…
Editor’s Note We are what we eat; eating well has never been a trivial matter. The scandal involving edible oil transported in tankers has once again sparked anxiety over food safety, highlighting the immense difficulty of tracing the origins of what we consume. Along the long chain from farm to…
Dehulling buckwheat seeds, grinding them into flour, mixing it with wheat flour to form a dough, and then cutting it into long, thin strands—this is how one of Japan’s most everyday foods is made. In Japanese, the word for ‘buckwheat’ (soba) is a homophone for ‘beside’. Thus, asking for ‘soba’…
