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.
Foodthink screens the field-research documentary “Whose Table, Whose Pasture” at Yonghe Lane Community, Tianshan District, Ürümqi, documenting herders around Qinghai Lake as imported frozen meat floods the market, livestock prices plummet and livelihoods buckle. Post-screening, local organisations and guests discuss whether Xinjiang’s pastoral areas face similar upheaval.
Harvard professor Chensheng Lu, apiarist Kenneth Wallholl and toxicologist Richard Callahan confirmed through a fifteen-hive field experiment: sustained low-dose ingestion of neonicotinoid insecticides from seed coating damages bees’ mitochondria, causing entire colonies to leave their hives with no corpse in sight.
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.
Pickers and delivery riders at Xiaoxiang, Hema, JD Qixian, and Pupu describe the three-minute limit, piece-rate pay, and physical toll in the comment section. Consumers respond with empathy, off-peak ordering, and reduced reliance, as the dialogue shifts from personal guilt to questioning platform algorithms and industry competition.
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.
On the hillsides of Tongchuan, the 110 mu of land Hongxia and her husband farmed under verbal agreements is being claimed back, mu by mu, by relatives who have returned home — and their 150,000 yuan in farm machinery has become a sunk cost they cannot shake.
Former consultant Chen Xi now organises members of the local clan to grow rice in the terraced fields of Yangdong Village, Qiandongnan, preserving more than twenty varieties of local paddy rice and grains and building a children’s library through purple rice charity sales.
Over the past two years, Foodthink has received real stories from young people about eating: from being unable to break free of takeaway to community canteens, from “digital pickles” to hands-on fermentation — working people have pieced together their own solutions from the minutiae of daily life.
Foodthink’s sixth round of the Lianhe Programme is open to applications from smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and community organisations, offering grants of 5,000–30,000 yuan and communications support for frontline climate mitigation and adaptation projects. Applications close on 17 May.
