Unfolding the Folded Table: This Year’s Keywords

How Did Imported “Fake Meat” Find Its Way onto the Tables of Qinghai–Tibet Herders?

Too Expensive or Too Cheap? A Review of “Fake Meat” Driving Out Real Meat

Nearly 20 Years of Investigative Reporting: How Did They Expose the “Cattle-Washing” Shadows of Brazilian Meat Firms?

Brazilian Deforestation Is Their Business – What Does It Have to Do with Us?

This Foodie Paradise Has Gobbled Up Half of Brazil’s Beef Offal Exports

As imported foods flood in, local heirloom varieties and their flavours are disappearing. Heirloom varieties are not merely a kind of food – they are the bond that holds together terroir, culture, and family memory – Baituwa, Hongzuino, Baimidou – and if no one keeps growing them, they will vanish from the world.

Growing Vanishing Glutinous Rice on the Sichuan Hills

A Chayote Seedling’s Breakthrough: Climate, Seeds, and the Crop Rush in County Towns

Why Has the Sweetness of Childhood Disappeared?

If No One Keeps Growing Them, They Will Vanish from the World Forever

Foraging for Wild Greens in the Netherlands: Getting Closer to Plants, and Closer Still

Whether it is fish from afar or meat from nearby, we have “lived alongside” the food we eat most often for years, and yet we still cannot see its true face. Can our understanding of food go beyond the level of consumption and reach deeper into places of origin, so we can grasp how changes there ripple out to our tables?

Two and a Half Years as an Agriculture Reporter, and I Still Cannot “See” Food

When an Anthropology Master’s Student Goes to Sell Meat at a Slaughterhouse

Salmon – Is It Really “Free”?

To understand food better, one actually needs to start with local ingredients. Because local food often grows beneath your feet, hides in the hills and forests, and ferments in the kitchen. What they tell is a different kind of “locality” – rootedness, handcraft, self-sufficiency, and going with the grain of nature.

Crowning with “Tihu” – A Fermented Delicacy from the Tibetan Plateau

How Yunnan Wild Tomatoes Become E’reng Valley Tomato Sauce | Kouzi, the Sauce Maker

With Agriculture This Advanced, Why Do People Still Eat Wild Greens?

Notes from the Culture Pavilion: Fermenting in Berlin

Another layer of meaning that food carries through taste is shared memory; taste, in turn, forms the emotional bond we have with home, family, and the past.

– Food Talk –

In 2025, Foodthink’s podcast “Food Talk” released 14 episodes. Over the past year, we have asked how, under the dominance of the mainstream food system, we can claim the right to “eat properly,” while also reflecting on the conflicts and risks inherent in that system itself.

Without a doubt, pre-made meals have been the longest-running and most influential topic in this year’s public food debates. Foodthink has been following the development of pre-made meals for some time – as early as January last year, before the public spat between Luo Yonghao and Jia Guolong erupted, we had already produced a podcast episode on the subject. Our guest Doudou even foresightfully provided a healthier, safer pre-made meal recipe for time-poor overworked workers. Is the future really the age of pre-made meals? Food Talk will continue to follow this topic.

The backlash against pre-made meals shows at least that, deep down, Chinese people still hold out for healthy, home-cooked meals with that unmistakable wok hei. But what happens when, one day, “pre-made” becomes synonymous with “cheap” and “convenient” – will that hope be crushed? In reality, whether it is food delivery, fresh-food e-commerce, or plastic packaging, it all serves a cheap and convenient urban lifestyle. Yet people know very little about the costs behind it or the risks the whole society bears as a result. At the same time, the companies closely tied to our cheap, convenient food system are using all manner of PR and greenwashing to keep us from seeing the truth. From peanuts, corn, and rice to bread, milk, and beer – how do these foods end up on our tables? Who is deciding what we eat? How can we find better social support networks so that what lands on our plates is food we can trust? There is so much more to talk about when it comes to food.

As food consumers, if we pay more attention to the farmers and the land that directly produce our food – to their livelihoods and ecological concerns – then we are already on the path to eating properly. Over the past year, we have followed many people working the land tirelessly, from the Greater Khingan Range in Heilongjiang to Chuxiong in Yunnan, from Pinggu in Beijing and Baoding in Hebei to Heshun in Shanxi. Their identities differ, the foods they grow and forage differ, and their circumstances differ, but all of them share a wish to protect the ecosystem and eat well. In 2025, Food Talk launched a new series, “100 People Who Feed Us.” In 2026, we hope to use the workers themselves as a lens for more nuanced, in-depth discussions of the food system that feeds us.

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In 2025, through sharing sessions, book clubs, markets, and workshops, Foodthink continued to build spaces for people who care about food and agriculture to meet and exchange ideas, staging more than 30 online and offline events. We went deep into the fields to document the impact of extreme weather on agriculture, and stepped onto the international stage to carry the voices of China’s ecological smallholder farmers. We dug up traditional wisdom in fermentation crocks and seed banks, and imagined future food-agriculture systems through novel games and board games.

This year, “Extreme weather” and “climate change” became the keywords. From the shattering and reweaving of towns and villages after the July floods in Hunan, to the climate shocks that hit Guangdong and Guangxi at year’s end, we brought together meteorologists, agricultural researchers, and frontline witnesses and documentarians in dialogue, trying to understand how climate change is redrawing China’s agricultural landscape, and how those caught up in it are responding.

In 2025, we amplified individual voices – from a returned silkworm rearer’s long journey toward making peace with herself, to the joys and worries of Altay herders navigating market forces and grazing lands, to the “going abroad” trail of post-90s ecological smallholder farmers who set out from China to Thailand, then to Rome. The series of creative sharing sessions on Fake Meat Driving Out Real Meat wove together the voices of grassland herders with academic perspectives, pressing into the complex questions behind industrial meat substitutes.

In 2025, we turned the pages of Vanishing Foods alongside our readers, using cases from China and abroad to open up discussion on the protection of biological food varieties and the survival of local cultures. At the book launch for Fermenting China: Yunnan & Guizhou, we traced the arc from the fermentation traditions of Yunnan and Guizhou to the preservation of local culture. To complement this theme, we ran interactive calls – “Not Available Today” and “Eat Something Good” – … Through interaction and reading, we asked ourselves: as flavours disappear, what else will we lose, and what can we still create?

Offline, at the “Hands at Work” market in Beijing and the urban-rural Harvest Festival in Guangdong, Foodthink partnered with the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market to set up smallholder farmer tables, handcraft workshops, and other activities. We invited Planet Earth! Spaceship to bring an interactive board game, and also brought a “Back to the Future” climate-change novel-continuation game and a ‘Poems Between Meals’ collage-poetry game, sparking reflection on the present and imagination of a sustainable future.

2025’s Last Letter: Foodthink Harvest Festival ‘Creative Chaos’ Grand Awards

Foodthink held the “The Flowing Table” Food-Agriculture Media Workshop from 5 to 7 September. Centred on the theme of “The Flowing Table,” the workshop explored four kinds of “flow” – the flow of climate change, trade, people and technology, and discourse and narrative – to think about and analyse our food-agriculture system, and the complex global flow systems behind our food.

This workshop brought together a diverse group of participants: beyond traditional news media, there were media editors from knowledge platforms, as well as independent creators who have spent years embedded at the front line, using film and video to document how smallholder farmers adapt to and are affected by climate disasters.

In addition, Foodthink’s sister organisation, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, provided participants with an “ecological smallholder” lunch. While we were discussing how agriculture should respond to extreme weather, how to support sustainable agriculture, and how to rebuild trust between consumers and producers, Foodthink was also supporting smallholder farmers through the most everyday, most direct action of all.

– Facing Climate Change: Rural Social Organisations in Action –

Climate change is turning what rural areas once called “natural disasters” into an everyday reality. Social organisations are striving to find ways to strengthen rural climate resilience. Over the past twenty years, they have been working out approaches to the climate crisis across multiple domains – agricultural livelihoods, energy transition, disaster risk reduction, rural elderly care, gender equality, and health. So when social organisations step into the intersection of rural life and climate change, how do they define the problems, and how do they act? What has succeeded, what has failed, and what have they learned?

The wisdom of those who came before, and the pitfalls they fell into, we have distilled into this report – Research on Action Pathways for Rural Social Organisations in Responding to Climate Change.

With Oxfam (Hong Kong)’s Beijing office, Foodthink conducted extensive interviews and survey research over the past year, and held workshops in Nanning and Xianyang respectively, exploring in depth with fellow farmers, village cadres, social organisations, and scholars the questions raised above. The report’s core finding is this: not only is the climate changing – the countryside itself is changing, and only by understanding the transformation of rural life can we discern the underlying logic of climate work. At the report launch, Foodthink emphasised that a genuine path to climate resilience can only be found on the basis of a deep understanding of rural life’s internal dynamics, and called on colleagues in the public-interest sector: “Don’t turn mitigation into a numbers game, and don’t turn adaptation into a game of words.”

Report Launch | Rather Than Change Colour at the Mention of “Climate,” Better to Put Down Steady Roots in Rural Areas

“Thank climate change for getting everyone to pay attention to rural areas”

Is Climate Change in Rural Areas Really Just a “Natural Disaster”?

– Co-Building and Co-Learning Camp for Local Ecological Agriculture Systems –

Ecological agriculture, no matter how eloquently we speak of it, ultimately comes down to growing things well. With climate change and market challenges growing ever more severe, the importance of good techniques becomes all the more apparent: they can raise crop quality and resilience, cut costs, and deliver yields that hold their own against conventional agriculture.

Where, then, to find such techniques? In December 2025, Foodthink hosted the second Co-Building and Co-Learning Camp for Local Ecological Agriculture Systems at Huiling Farm in Guangzhou, drawing over 30 participants from across the country who are committed to a career in ecological agriculture. The camp goes beyond exploring the underlying logic of ecological growing methods: it also brings together traditional smallholder farmers, new-generation farmers, consumer co-buying groups, and NGOs to discuss how, in a market for ecological and organic produce where “a hundred flowers are gradually dazzling the eye,” smallholder farmers can build on their own strengths, advance steadily, and find a viable path for sustaining their livelihoods. In that sense, the camp is merely the starting gun of a long marathon. This year, Foodthink will also organise a third camp – farmers who are interested are welcome to star Foodthink’s WeChat public account so as not to miss the latest training updates.

Learn Practical Ecological Agriculture Techniques in Three Days | Training Call

– And More –

As is usual, a few articles this year have been made to “disappear” and cannot make an appearance in this piece. To read them, simply leave a message on Foodthink’s WeChat public account with “丑团” (ugly produce), “地膜” (plastic mulch film), “一刀切” (one-size-fits-all), or “撑伞” (holding an umbrella). You are also welcome to follow Foodthink on Douban and Xiaohongshu so you don’t lose track of us.

One Last Thing

All of us at Foodthink wish you all, in the Year of the Horse,

On 🐎, eat! On 🐎, eat well!

●On 7 February, Foodthink fully took over of the Jishi offline space at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market (for just one day) – see what delicious New Year’s Eve dishes we got to enjoy. You can still pre-order now, so get your hands on some healthy, tasty ecological New Year’s Eve dishes!

Coordinated by: Li Ye, Kerry

Edited by: Tianle