Miantuan Jingjing worked in insurance in Shenzhen, with overtime so relentless she spent even her birthday calculating payroll. Browsing the wet market, making chicken soup noodles, growing roses on her balcony – these small things gradually pulled her out of takeout and burnout until she finally quit.
In 2008, Cao Xiaohong built a grocery-buying group in a small Hunan town with email and cash. Xiaoyunsheng has sold at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market for over a decade. Both have gone from “die-hard organic” to “laid-back shopping”, keeping the seasoned feel for market picking and sustaining trust.
I. Flowers in Early Bloom On 3 May, in Jinqu Town, Mei County, Shaanxi, Xu Yuanlin spotted the messenger flower in his vineyard first thing in the morning. He was stunned. The so-called messenger flower is the first blossom of the season; like a herald, it warns farmers to begin…
JD recognises riders’ employment relationship and bears the full cost of social insurance and housing provident fund contributions, costing riders just 525 yuan a month; Meituan sidesteps employment status, subsidising only flexible-employment pension and medical at 1,500 yuan. “Losing 0.39 yuan per order” ignores commissions – food delivery is actually profitable.
From sugar-funded commentary by Harvard professors to obesity research backed by Coca-Cola, corporate interests have shaped US dietary guidelines, leaving ordinary people to pay the health price.
The film follows a woman with no salary and no decision-making authority on an organic farm at the Yangtze River estuary. After bearing multiple physical and emotional labours, she loses her hometown, her mother, and the farm in turn — then leads the last cow into the reed flat.
Under the Rice Tariffication Law and the impact of imported rice, smallholders on Mindanao in the Philippines face falling paddy purchase prices and high retail rice prices. They are turning to breeding and agroecology to seek food autonomy.
Farmers, grassroots social organisations and funders at the Nanning workshop discussed cases such as Huanglongbing (citrus greening disease) in navel oranges and pasture degradation in grazing regions: market conditions and policy gaps often shape rural climate resilience more than extreme weather.
Passed down since the collectivisation era by farmers saving their own seeds, Guanzhong’s “Baituwa” melon helped growers make fortunes in the 1980s. Now unable to withstand storage and transport, and not “attractive” enough, it has retreated from city shop shelves, glimpsed only at rural markets.
For World Book Day, Foodthink’s editors, authors and peers recommend books that connect food, land and the natural environment, including Bruno Latour’s ecological politics, French rural transformation, China’s environmental movement, vanishing foods and industrial additives.
