2025’s Last Letter: A Grand Showcase of Foodthink’s Bumper Year Festival Antics

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This is Foodthink’s last post for 2025. Surprised, right? It isn’t a roundup! (Actually, the year-end summary hasn’t been dug out yet, so please try your call again later…)

For a start, let’s take a look at all the antics we pulled off at the recently concluded Guangdong Bumper Year Festival!

◉ Foodthink editor Yuyang is “casting a spell”. Photo | Yan Qiange

Co-creating Climate Science Fiction

Thanks to the annual Bumper Year Festival, we spent a winter solstice in Guangzhou as hot as a summer solstice — even Santa Claus would have had to ride a camel. One can only wonder whether this unseasonably hot winter solstice can be put down to climate change.

Over the three days, we stirred together the titles of more than a hundred articles Foodthink wrote over the past year about land, farmers, food and climate and a large table of Cantonese cuisine, turning them into story fragments. Nearly a hundred children and adults present drew word cards at random, played a relay of “piecing together good prose”, and co-created eight climate science-fiction stories on the spot that would make AI feel outdone.

In these stories, you will see the food-fuelled imagination of the people of Guangdong —

  • Could the ultimate solution to saving humanity really be — potato, maize, beef offal, ginger milk curd, rice noodle roll?
  • The Ice… Ice Age has arrived, and the whole world becomes one grand morning tea feast!
  • The ginger milk curd’s résumé reads in part: to seize me, the various departments even threw char siu bao at one another… char siu bao didn’t offend anyone…
  • Rice noodle rolls take over the airspace, and the people of Guangdong transform into cosmic free-range chickens…
These eight science-fiction stories hold fast to one creative principle: Even at the end of the world, food must be delicious. This perfectly echoes this year’s Bumper Year Festival theme: Every trick in the book for one good meal.

◉ For more information about the Bumper Year Festival, please click the link on the poster.

Through everyone’s creative writing, we’ve gained the chance to return from “words” to “reality” and reimagine the relationship between people and land, climate, and food 🍚

Of course, creations this brilliant shouldn’t only live at the Bumper Year Festival. We’ve tidied up all eight stories and published them online, freeing them from paper and pen to achieve “cyber immortality”. In addition, to more vividly capture the mindset of long-time Cantonese people, we’ve also prepared an AIGC version — with ChatGPT visualising these abstractions

👇 Swipe to explore the AI’s imagination

*Friendly reminder: before viewing, please make sure you’ve eaten today

Cantonese Edition of Food-Time Poems

Apart from joining the climate science-fiction story relay, introverts can also sit down and mix Foodthink article titles with Guangdong flavours to create “Food-Time Poems”. That’s Guangzhou for you… I’ve never seen such delicious collage poems! In the spaces between the words, we catch the scent of the land, taste the street food, and share our thoughts.

◉ View: savour Guangzhou’s whimsical ideas and abundant poetry~

Not Served on That Day

◉ Everyone shares foods that are getting harder to find and the stories behind them.

As familiar foods and flavours disappear, our relationship with land, climate and memory quietly changes. What are some foods that you used to be able to eat but are now hard to find?

Green mandarins, Baituwa; grandma’s pie, the guotiao downstairs; Qimo roasted persimmons… What did they taste like? And why did they disappear?

We hope to work with everyone to record the foods that are disappearing and preserve these flavour stories and sweet memories. Everyone is welcome to leave a comment sharing your “sold out for today” item~

◉ Guess what this “food” is?

It was wonderful to meet so many Foodthink readers from the Greater Bay Area at the Bumper Year Festival—

Some came from Huizhou, Foshan, Shunde and Hong Kong,

and there were even veteran readers who have been following Foodthink since 2017.

Thank you for coming to see us in person at last — we’ve finally made the leap from being online friends to real life! We’re so grateful to all of you who have accompanied us on the other side of the screen year after year~ We’ve also made a whole lot of new friends, and in the days ahead, we hope Foodthink can be with you as you eat well and live a healthy life.

Forum Recap

For the first time, Foodthink has brought to Guangzhou, to meet readers, the documentary “Whose Table, Whose Pasture”, made with support from 2024 Lianhe Creative Programme. The film’s director travelled deep into the pastoral areas around Qinghai Lake, recording the impact of large volumes of imported frozen beef and lamb entering local markets. The film shows how imported meat, with its low-price advantage, has impacted local beef and lamb, and asks the harsh question: In the global meat supply chain, who benefits from low prices, and who pays the price?

◉ “Whose Table, Whose Pasture” poster

On the afternoon of the final day, we invited Zhao Yushun and Yuan Zhengzhen, documentary makers who focus on agriculture, rural areas and farmers, to share the disaster-related impacts they observed while visiting rural areas in Guangdong and Guangxi this year. Fenglian, deeply rooted in Guangzhou, shared how the city’s “extra-long summers” over the past two years have challenged crop production. When agriculture and rural areas are affected by extreme weather, what changes are taking place in cities and at the table? Readers and consumers on site also joined the discussion about extreme weather, acknowledging the reality and seeking solutions.

◉ View: Zhao Yushun’s talk; Liao Fenglian’s talk; reader questions. Photo | Ming Chun

On site, our dedicated photographer captured many warm and joyful moments.

◉ We hope you, too, can smile knowingly. Photo | Yan Qiange
If you still don’t know what Bumper Year Festival is, in the simplest terms, it is China’s largest in-person sustainable food and farming gathering, born in Guangzhou but with an influence that has gone far beyond Guangdong and Guangxi. Now in its ninth year, from the original farmers’ market to today’s interdisciplinary event that blends organic farming, art and literature, and social issues, Bumper Year Festival has always been the link connecting villages and cities, producers and people.

As Bumper Year Festival’s only host from outside the region, Foodthink seizes the chance each year to come to Guangzhou and meet farming friends and readers in the south. We have grown here, and here we have witnessed: when producers and consumers lift one another up, the act of eating gains dignity and meaning beyond making a living.

Bon us

In the images below, can you recognise any of the organic smallholders that Foodthink has covered and worked with?

◉ For some, the answer is written right on the riddle 😂. Photo | Yan Qiange
2025, Happy wrap! May everyone, after all this boundless imagining, still have the energy to turn ideas into action.

In 2026, we’ll meet again in Guangzhou and celebrate another bumper year.

“Eat well, drink well, and may everything go your way.”

Planning: Li Ye

Editors: Kerry, Tianle

Story images: ZX, Li Ye

Published by Foodthink