In a small town in eastern Sichuan, at a modern slaughterhouse park invested in by the author’s aunt, cattle and sheep orders, retail cuts and pre-dawn deliveries make up daily life; customer complaints and workshop smells expose how industrialised slaughter is hidden from everyday life.
From Yunnan’s Red Junglefowl, Guizhou’s high-legged chicken and Little Liangshan Yi chickens, Zou Lei, a PhD student at Minzu University of China, sees that local chicken breeds are fading as industrialised farming, urbanisation and foreign varieties arrive, and food, language and ritual change accordingly.
Sold-out sourdough bread, olive oil, sea salt and vinegar are going viral as UK consumers use ‘anti-ultra-processed food’ and social-media aesthetics to turn affordable basic staples into pricier lifestyle purchases.
A couple in Lufeng, Guangdong, returned to their orchard and sent lychees elsewhere. Shipping and packaging ended up taking nearly a third of their income, and they had to pick and pack while it was cool to keep the fruit from turning black.
61-year-old farmer Sun Wenxiang, with his wife and father, maintains ecological farming in Qilong Village, Hongya County, keeping old rice varieties such as Red-beak Glutinous Rice, relying on black pigs, biogas slurry and daily weeding, while questioning whether old varieties will reach the next generation.
Grandma Kouzi has spent four years reclaiming land in Villain’s Valley, Fujian, turning a muddy mountain gully behind the house into a slope where gardenias, wild ginger and coreopsis grow, and, amid repeated failures, has also acknowledged the boundaries of her capability.
After a short video about Zhejiang and Shanghai incineration plants ‘competing for rubbish’ went viral, incineration cannot replace waste sorting; dioxins, microplastics and waste reduction at source remain unavoidable issues.
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.
Japanese government intervention is still struggling to bring rice prices down. The acreage-reduction policy, JA’s price-setting and rural ageing leave rice farmers with meagre incomes, without successors, as paddy fields keep disappearing.
An ordinary employee at a McDonald’s in Shanghai’s Jing’an District earns 19 yuan per hour, rising to 21 yuan only after 1,000 hours. When takeaway orders surge, riders are pressed by the platform, staff are pressed by orders, and leftovers are thrown away after closing.
