Podcast episodes, transcripts, interviews, and related content.
Anthropologist Zhong Shuru turned ten years of wet market research into China’s Wet Markets, attempting to understand China’s vast and intricate food system through the wet market’s gateway. She visited over 200 markets across the country, documenting how food moves and how people in them live and change.
Xiaoxiong, a master’s student at Huazhong Agricultural University researching low-carbon agriculture, shreds straw on rainy nights and records data in paddy fields as part of her daily routine. Now graduated, she faces the reality of finding work in agriculture.
McDonald’s uses price anchoring, shrinking stores and its shared-staff system to cut costs. According to former shift manager Jiang Ke, this efficiency machine still ultimately relies on human on-the-spot judgement as its safety net.
Jiang Ke, who served as a shift manager at McDonald’s for seven months, has experienced the fryer whistles, vacuum-packed shredded lettuce and order screens in the open-plan kitchen, and seen how waiting and complaints when customers collect their meals feed into the store’s score.
From a Beijing office to a Dong village in Qiandongnan, Chen Xi spent seven years building a timber house, growing nine varieties of rice reliably, and using the proceeds from 5,000 jin of purple rice to build the village’s first library for the children.
Li Yangyang, a lecturer at China Agricultural University, and postgraduate Yang Ruoxianzi at the Quzhou Science and Technology Station show that an ag student’s daily life – from composting and field experiments to career paths – is more than just growing crops.
Yi Fujin of Zhejiang University begins with one cow, one mu of maize and a late spring cold snap to explain how agricultural insurance works and why smallholder farmers struggle to get their claims paid in extreme weather.
March oilseed rape season: after drones sprayed pesticides, bee colonies in many areas were “wiped out” – beekeepers received no notice. Agricultural ecology practitioner Li Chunliang and pollination conservation scholar Zou Yi on spraying vs beekeeping: who files, who gives way, who pays for ¥700 billion of pollination services.
Fourteen years after returning to Tongxiang, Zhejiang, silkworm farmer Yu Jiangang has taken on 15 mu (Chinese acres) of rice paddy. Under pressure from industrialised sericulture, with insurance covering only one third, he is trying to maintain rice–silkworm symbiosis.
Three mothers talk about what’s behind the “fussy eater”: from a childhood of eating only the dumpling wrapper, to a rice-ball experiment meltdown, to a teenager “eating dinner three times a day” — intergenerational memory, invisible emotional labour, and that first mouthful to feed yourself, hidden within picky eating.
