Matthew Kessler 0:02
There's a long-standing idea in China, if you can't keep the people from going hungry, you don't deserve to rule. Today, the people add up to about 1.4 billion. That's a lot of people to keep from going hungry.
And by most measures, China has been remarkably successful.
Consider that 70 years ago, most people in China ate pork a few times a year. Today, it's lunch. Every single day. In just a few decades, China moved from widespread food shortages to one of the most technologically advanced food systems in the world.
The consequences of that transformation didn't stay within China's borders.
Take this example - China now buys roughly 60% of globally traded soybeans. Most of China's soy comes from Brazil, grown on an area approaching the size of Spain. Imagine an entire country given over to growing one crop, and another country importing that, primarily to feed its chickens and pigs.
Whatever you're picturing, when you think about China's food system — this series is probably going to challenge that.
Fengwei Liu 1:17
In 2024, China has almost 600 million online meal ordering users.
Ron 1:23
The largest farm in China has 3.23 million sows.
Zhang Hongzhou 1:27
1959 was a very special year in China. It was the start of the great so-called Chinese famine.
Matthew 1:39
I'm Matthew Kessler, and this is Feeding One in Six: China and the Future of Food, presented by TABLE.
China's food system is enormous, contradictory, and honestly kind of humbling to cover. We're not going to crack it open and hand you some kind of master key.
What we can do — what we're going to do — is follow a few foods over the next four episodes. Pork. Rice. Fish. And use them as a way into the bigger questions: the pressures driving consolidation, the politics of self-sufficiency, the global implications that come with feeding this many people this quickly.
I wanted to know what that transformation looks like in daily life. So I called up my niece, who has spent the last seven years living in what China considers a tiny city - with almost two million people.
Here's Ofir, describing her school lunch.
Ofir 2:44
So it's like a cafeteria. You get in - you wait in line. There are two workers there. They scan our faces and they can see what we ordered.
Matthew 2:55
At the start of each week, the kids pre-select their meals.
Ofir 2:59
Every weekend we take dad and mom's phone. We just scan our faces at home and then we order the food. There are photos and explanations of what we are going to eat. And every week it's different.
Matthew 3:11
There's different options. Rice is always on the plate — usually with vegetables, and some meat or fish.
Ofir 3:18
My favorite. I'll say it in Chinese cause I don't know it in English. It's jih szo chan.
Matthew 3:24
According to Ofir's dad Matan, the food is so good that it actually gets the kids out the door in the morning. But the cafeteria is just one small example of how differently food reaches people in China today.
Matan 3:40
They really live in the future. Not only in that. You can also order food when you're in the high train station. When you're in the train, you can order food.
Matthew 3:51
So you're on the high speed rail, and you give them your seat number.
Matan 3:56
Like KFC they will come to your next stop and they will give you the food to your seat and go out. You can order McDonalds to your seat in the train.
Matthew 4:12
This is daily life for tens of millions of urban Chinese. On one level, it's pretty impressive. For some listeners, maybe even a little dystopian.
Consider for a second what's behind it. The people making those deliveries, the low-wage riders weaving through traffic, many of them are the same people who left farms in the countryside to find work in cities like these.
That movement — from land to city, from farming to delivery — is one of the largest migrations in human history. And it hasn't been painless. In the last 25 years, estimates suggest around 200 million smallholder farmers have left the land.
More than half, gone in a single generation. Millions more were involuntarily relocated to make way for dams and development. Villages are shrinking. The population is aging. And there's a quiet public health crisis where hundreds of millions of people still live.
So how do you hold all of this at once? A country that's moved from famine to face-scanned school lunches in a single lifetime — and left a lot behind in the process.
This episode looks at that question through three windows. The first is cultural — what Chinese people eat, and how fast that's changed. The second is political — how a government haunted by famine makes sure it never happens again. And the third is everyday life — the hidden costs behind how hundreds of millions of people get their meals.
Window #1 - What exactly is "Chinese food"?
Matthew 6:10
To understand China's food system, you first have to grapple with its diversity. China is bigger than the continental United States, and has a culinary history that stretches back thousands of years. The food varies so dramatically by region, by era, by class, that any single image of it is almost certainly wrong.
Michelle King 6:32
The thing about chili peppers is that it's such a late entry into Chinese cuisine, yet you cannot think of Sichuanese cuisine or Hunanese cuisine without chili peppers. But it's really just from the 16th century onward, which is in Chinese terms very late.
Matthew 6:48
That's Michelle King, explaining how a five-hundred-year-old ingredient can still be considered relatively new.
Michelle King 6:56
I'm a professor of Chinese history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Matthew 7:03
One of the biggest challenges in talking about China's food system is that the phrase "Chinese food" can mean almost anything.
Michelle King 7:11
That's why I always find it funny if I hear anyone say, "I don't like Chinese food." That's only because you haven't found the kind of Chinese food you like yet. I guarantee you I could find at least ten dishes you would love, that you just haven't tasted yet.
Matthew 7:30
I grew up in the Long Island suburbs outside New York. Our family ate Chinese take-out about once a week growing up.
Michelle King 7:38
I wouldn't say what people are eating is not Chinese food. It's a kind of diasporic Chinese food that largely created to cater to non-Chinese palates.
The word authenticity comes up when I say, "Well, the Chinese that people think of today is not the food that people have eaten since time immemorial." It's a much later development. So authenticity to when? And authentic to where?
Matthew 8:12
To get a sense of how varied Chinese food actually is, let's start with geography. China's landscape has a huge range. You've got frozen forests, deserts, towering Himalayan peaks, winding rivers, fertile plains and tropical coasts along the South China Sea. Today, more than one hundred Chinese cities have populations over one million.
Michelle King 8:48
It's really quite unparalleled just because of the size of China, you know, bigger than India, bigger than Mexico, way bigger than France. And if you think of any of those places and you think of their culinary diversity, you just have to multiply that by a factor of five or 10 or 50 or whatever to get what it's like in China.
Matthew 9:08
It's a really hard place to divide up into regional cuisines, but it hasn't stopped people from trying. The most basic division is north and south.
Michelle King 9:17
People in the north are really known as the wheat eaters. So that's above the Yangtze River. And that's where you're traditionally your pancakes and your buns and your stuffed breads and your dumplings. That all comes from the North traditionally. And people in the South are the rice eaters. Because there would be a lot of rain and they could even grow double crops of rice in some places in the South. That's the basic staple food that you would have.
Nowadays, of course, everybody in China eats everything. But traditionally that was kind of like for some southerners, unless they eat rice, they don't feel like they're full, right? They have to have a bowl of rice.
Matthew 9:59
You can slice it more finely than North and South. One person who tried to make sense of this diversity for a global audience was Fu Pei-mei, a cookbook author and television host from Taiwan whose four-decade career taught generations of Chinese families across the diaspora how to cook. Michelle King wrote a book about her.
Michelle King 10:19
Pei-mei's Chinese cookbook divides China into four, cardinal directions north south east and west.
So if you want to break it down very simply, southern food could be like Cantonese food - a lot of fresh food, a lot of seafood, because they're right on the coast. They're also very well known for eating absolutely anything. Anything with four legs, they say, except a table that they'll eat. Anything with wings, except an airplane they'll eat. That's just the saying they have.
You think of Western Chinese food, you think of Sichuan — really hot, really spicy, sour flavors, a lot of pickley things. If you think of the east, it's Shanghainese food — known for being the most exquisite and delicate of Chinese cuisines. And then the northerners as hearty, because it's cold. So you need these strong flavors. Strong and salty, a lot of scallions.
Matthew 11:27
A substack called Chinese Cooking Demystified took this even further, analyzing and naming 63 distinct regional Chinese culinary identities.
Michelle King 11:38
Right, you could just draw the line however you like. They have their reasons and it's a fascinating look at the variety of Chinese culinary tastes.
Matthew 11:51
The point is this: the food that shows up on your plate in China, and the system behind it, vary enormously depending on where you are.
So that's the geography. Now let's look at how these cuisines have changed over time. Because what people eat today looks very different from what their grandparents ate. To understand that, we need to go back even further.
Michelle King 12:17
If one just thinks historically over the long span of Imperial Chinese history, I think the main thing to know is that most people haven't had that much to eat. It's really, you know, like most places in the world. It is if people had food, it was some kind of starch and in the South that would be rice with a small amount of flavored ingredients. Sometimes a little bit of protein, but people would not have been eating meat on a regular basis. I mean, ordinary peasants or ordinary people, right?
The kind of high cuisine, the really fancy banquet dishes and everything was always just a part of elite culture. But the vast majority of people would never have had the chance to taste all these wonderful delightful treats.
On the one hand there's that, on the other there is this intense cultural interest in food. It's an area that people would write and talk about in ways that you don't see paralleled in English history or in French history even. It's like a, just a much longer and deeper engagement on the part of elites.
Matthew 13:20
What would some of those historical texts look like?
Michelle King 13:23
There's a very famous text by this literatus named Yuanmei. And he wrote this kind of, it's called the Recipes from the Garden of Contentment is the one way it's translated. It's the Suiyuan Shidan.
So It's kind of like the web today, like where do you buy the best fish? When is the season to buy this particular fruit? When should you eat this? Who makes the best knives? I think of it as a handbook of taste.
Matthew 13:55
So that's a picture of what Chinese food looked like historically. It's highly regional, varied and for many people, scarce. The big change comes in the modern period. After Mao's death and the economic reforms of the late 1970s. That is when things shifted dramatically.
Michelle King 14:15
Basically since the post-Mao reform. after 1978, when Deng Xiaoping comes into power and they start to open up the Chinese markets and people start to have more money, right? That's when you see an explosion of restaurants on the Chinese urban dining scenes. But because of the upheavals of the Maoist period, basically people were more concerned about getting enough to eat. Not what kind of speciality food do you want to eat during the period of famine. It's just - do you have enough to eat?
Matthew 14:52
In just a few decades, China moved from a food system defined by scarcity to one defined by choice. Diets shifted toward more animal foods, restaurants exploded across cities, and food delivery became a daily part of life.
Michelle King 15:07
I think all these things existed in some small way, or form before Mao even, but the scale of it and the sheer size of it and the nature of it today is quite different for sure.
The other thing that I like to encourage my students to think about is like for an urban Chinese kid today, McDonald's is part of his foodways landscape.
I've had Chinese students in my class who talk about it like yeah, we grew up eating McDonald's. They think of it as American, but they also don't think of it as – it's like how many people in the US would think of Chinese food, right.
Matthew 15:53
So my weekly Chinese takeout growing up was a bit like a kid in China getting McDonald's today.
All of today's food diversity - the regional specialities, the diaspora cuisines, the explosion of restaurants and delivery apps - is the story of abundance. Of choice.
But as we talked about, for most of Chinese history, the question wasn't what to eat. It was whether there would be enough.
Window #2. If you don't feed the people, you don't deserve to rule
Matthew 16:51
To understand why food security remains such a central political priority, I spoke with Zhang Hongzhou, author of Securing the Rice Bowl: China and Global Food Security.
Zhang Hongzhou 17:02
My name is Zhang Hongzhou. I'm an assistant professor at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University.
Matthew 17:11
Hongzhou was raised in a village in Northern China. But his journey to this topic starts earlier - with his father's story.
Zhang Hongzhou 17:19
My father was actually born in 1959.
Matthew 17:20
He was born in Henan province, at the epicenter of what was about to become the deadliest famine in human history.
Zhang Hongzhou 17:29
Later on I realized that 1959 was a very special year in China. It was the start of the great so called Chinese famine.
Matthew 17:36
This man-made disaster is a defining moment for the country, and for how its leaders think about food to this day.
Zhang Hongzhou 17:44
My father's birth parents could not raise him, could not take care of him and had to give him away. So it led to all sort of social complications, that affects myself as well. Because my brother and I were given different surnames. So that was a little puzzling. Why was that the case?
During that period, according to different research, millions and millions of Chinese were starved to death.
Matthew 18:13
Hongzhou thinks this is a key difference between the Chinese perception of food security versus how others see it in the outside world or in the West.
Zhang Hongzhou 18:23
It's not just one person, but the entire society, generations. Later on, when I started looking at food security, I realized that particular history has so much impact on how people see about it.
Because if you look at some of the statements by the Chinese leaders, right? Many of them went through the same period. They are now in their 60s, 70s, 80s. when some of them personally went through or experienced the food shortages. So that experiences shaped their understanding of this issue and across their policy choices.
Matthew 18:55
This includes current President Xi Jinping. Though he was born to an elite political family, he was one of many young people sent to the country for political reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. There are a number of accounts of him scrambling around to find anything to feed himself. Few world leaders have had that experience.
And it's not just recent history. China has a long record of famine stretching back thousands of years, which are mentioned throughout its historical texts. One even described China as "the land of famine."
Zhang Hongzhou 19:30
Almost every year from 100 BC to the Qing dynasty. You would have by drought or flood, the famine occurring in at least one of the provinces in China.
Matthew 19:42
That long history shaped a political philosophy that ties food security directly to the right to govern. It's the idea we opened with — and Hongzhou traces it back to Confucian times.
Zhang Hongzhou 19:54
The rulers - the Chinese emperors - they were considered the sons of heaven. They can lose their mandate of heaven if you have certain conditions. One of the conditions is if you have famines in the country.
Matthew 20:08
In other words: if the state cannot feed the population, it loses its right to govern.
Zhang Hongzhou 20:16
From that angle, to safeguard, ensure that the country had enough food to feed its population, became a key source of political legitimacy for the Chinese emperors to Chinese Communist Party.
Matthew 20:31
And the Communist Party takes it seriously.
Zhang Hongzhou 20:34
You have 22 years, 22 consecutive years, that the country's number one policy document has been about agriculture, food security, food production.
So we have history, we have political reasons. That just highlights paramount importance of food security to China.
Matthew 20:58
That's a window into the historical and political roots of China's preoccupation with feeding its people. Now let's look at how that preoccupation has played out in practice over the last seventy years — because the approach has shifted significantly, and those shifts matter for understanding where we are today.
The story starts with the famine itself. Outside of China, the years 1959 to 1961 are regarded as one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history. Estimates of the death toll vary — but most range in the tens of millions. In 1962, China's then-president described the famine as "30 percent natural disaster and 70 percent human error."
Much of that human error was tied to the Great Leap Forward - a campaign launched by Mao in 1958 to rapidly transform rural China. Private farming was abolished. Villagers were organized into large collective communes. Agricultural production was reorganized around centrally planned quotas. Which meant that the state dictated production targets.
Some of these policies proved disastrous. Grain production was often over-reported, and the state continued to procure food based on those inflated numbers - leaving rural communities with too little to survive.
After Mao's death, the next important figure for our story is Deng Xiaoping. Deng dismantled the collectivization system and land was contracted back to households under what became known as the household responsibility system. This gave farmers direct incentives to produce more, including opening up markets for the sale of surplus crops.
By the 1990s, China was integrating into the global economy. It was around this time that environmental analyst Lester Brown published an article, and then a book, called Who Will Feed China? The thesis was that with China's rapid economic growth, urbanization, and dietary shift towards more meat, its own domestic food production wouldn't be able to keep up.
This would force China to rely heavily on global markets for grain and could cause a strain in world food supplies. His analysis was largely right, but his predictions of how it would play out were off.
He was right that China would reshape global food markets, but he underestimated China's ability to increase domestic production and the world's ability to expand supply. China did not trigger a global grain crisis; it became the world's largest agricultural buyer instead.
Zhang Hongzhou 23:52
On the one hand, have a very impressive increase in terms of domestic grain yield, grain output. But on the other hand, the demand increased much faster. More and more people, Chinese consumers, became wealthier. Then the diet shifts from more plant-based to protein-based, animal proteins, which means more demand for animal feed. So that's why you have massive import in terms of soybeans and of course later on corn.
Matthew 24:24
Around this time China began to lower its tariffs in order to join the World Trade Organization.
The question shifted from simply how to produce enough food to how to secure it both at home and abroad.
Targets were set for basic grain self-sufficiency and very high self-sufficiency in staple grains such as rice and wheat.
This led to internal debates. Should China prioritize domestic production or prioritize import?
Zhang Hongzhou 24:51
I remember there was a statement from the Minister of Finance saying, why are we paying so much money for our farmers to grow grains when we can buy so much cheaply from the international market?
And then there was another event, the 2007-2008 global food crisis.
Matthew 25:10
During global food crisis, prices for staple crops like rice, wheat, and corn doubled and in some cases tripled, triggering unrest in several countries. For Chinese leaders, it then reinforced a long-standing concern: relying too heavily on imports could leave the country vulnerable during these price shocks.
Zhang Hongzhou 25:35
In late 2013, when the Chinese president Xi Jinping, when he became president for the first time. He introduced a new food security strategy.
Matthew 25:44
This marks the newest shift. Xi's strategy emphasised technological innovation to ramp up domestic production. But also made a subtle and important shift, from maximising output to managing risk and stability. And that meant taking a more active role internationally.
Zhang Hongzhou 26:04
That I think, if you look at it, it's just a wording, a lot of continuity. But if you look carefully, examine carefully, there was a major shift in the country's food security strategy. So 95% self-sufficiency rate is no longer mentioned. Instead, for the first time, the country says we are going to utilize more of the international resource.
So moderate import was officially included as a key part, an integral part of the country's food security strategy.
Coincided with that, of course, was the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Matthew 26:40
China's Belt and Road Initiative was a sweeping effort to expand infrastructure, trade routes and economic partnerships across Asia, Africa and beyond.
Part of what that meant in practice was Chinese capital flowing into the farms, ports and supply chains abroad, some of which help feed China today.
That's a story we'll return to across this series — because it's where China's food choices become the rest of the world's reality.
Matthew 27:21
This is not the food system most people picture when they think of China. It's deliberate, internally conflicted, and globally entangled.
So far, the episode has told two stories — the diversity of what people eat, and the politics of making sure there's enough. Both are really about how China got from scarcity to abundance in a single generation.
Researchers call this shift the "nutrition transition" - and by most measures, it's been a success story. Undernutrition has fallen dramatically. Diets have diversified. People have choices their grandparents couldn't have imagined.
But abundance creates its own problems. China now has more overweight and obese people than any other country on Earth. Diet-related diseases like obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease are rising fast, and the health system is only beginning to reckon with the scale of it. China is simultaneously managing the legacy of too little and the consequences of too much. That transition is still underway.
As we look through our final window, we peek into a seemingly ordinary part of the food system: delivery. Because it looks, on the surface, like nothing more than convenience.
Window #3. The cost of convenience
Fengwei Liu 28:59
Around half of the adults in China and about 20% of the children and adults aged 6 to 17 are overweight or obese, and the trends are still going up.
Matthew 29:07
That's Feng Wei Liu.
Fengwei Liu 29:07
My name is Feng Wei Liu. I'm the director of FOLU China. The Food and Land Use Coalition.
Matthew 29:21
The Food and Land Use Coalition is a global network working to make food and land use systems more sustainable and fair. Fengwei has been tracking how China's dietary transformation is playing out in public health.
Fengwei Liu 29:26
In 2024, China has about 600 million online meal ordering users.
Matthew 29:26
Two-fifths of China's population orders food delivery. This represents a little more than half China's internet users. Compare that to 25 years ago when internet access was a luxury, and only 2-3% of the population could get online.
Fengwei Liu 29:59
And this change is also happening fast in the county level cities and the township centers as well. The good digital infrastructure make it easier for delivery and food service to expand beyond big cities.
Matthew 29:59
That infrastructure is incredibly integrated. Apps like WeChat function as what's called a "super app." On a single platform, you can message friends, call a taxi, pay your bills, translate languages, and order a meal.
But infrastructure isn't the only reason delivery is so widespread.
Fengwei Liu 30:41
I think it's both demand and supply. On the demand side, fast work that make delivery feels like an everyday convenience service that we really need. And on the consumption side, there's high density cities. There's a dense restaurant supply, a short delivery distance and massive scale make this model work.
Matthew 30:41
Like Fengwei says, this system really matches demand. Home kitchens are really small, people have intense work pressures, and food delivery is tasty, affordable and convenient. But at what cost?
Fengwei Liu 31:27
I think food delivery in China is a system that externalizes costs. So lots of the impact stays invisible to the consumers. Like socially, the push for a faster delivery makes the traffic accidents and occupational injury are more likely to happen. And many riders still don't have a full social security coverage or adequate work injury protection. And environmentally, the footprint is substantial.
Matthew 31:27
Either you're going to the restaurant, or it's coming to you. So what makes delivery more costly for the environment?
Fengwei Liu 33:00
A delivery meal usually requires multiple layers of packaging, the containers, the bags, the cutlery, the insulation, which creates far more waste than eating in.
Food waste is another big problem. So many restaurants rely on pre-prepared components and the standardized portions. That's reduced the flexibility and can create upstream waste.
For example, I myself, I usually eat about 50 grams of rice per meal. And every time I order delivery, I ask for a smaller portion of rice. And it just never happens. So when I observe in the restaurant, I realize rice is often pre-packed in the fixed portion because it saves time and labor. For the restaurant perspective, the standardization is cheaper than customization. But the waste is basically invisible to the consumers.
And for a health perspective, delivery can also shift our eating patterns. Like compared to vegetables, the meat based dishes tend to travel better in taste and the texture. So delivery menu often lean towards heavier, oilier, saltier dishes and larger portions, which raises the risk of a high energy density and salt and the fat intake.
Delivery exists everywhere in the world, right? But this issue is more pronounced in China because the delivery has become such a low cost, high frequency, ultra-scale infrastructure. The high urban density and the strong logistic networks make it extremely cheap and fast and platform competition and subsidize, it's also a huge push to it.
So if I compare to Europe, where we think the costs are more internalized in Europe like labor protection, like packaging, like the waste treatments. And those have historically been less reflected in the price in China. So consumers experience almost free delivery while society carries a much larger environment and health costs.
Matthew 33:00
So are you saying it's cheaper to deliver a meal than to buy the ingredients and cook the same meal at home?
Fengwei Liu 33:00
It is much cheaper.
Matthew 34:25
At the start of this episode, I asked what comes to mind when you think about China's food system. Here's what I keep coming back to.
China's food system today is still in transition. And the direction isn't settled. It's shaped by a set of powerful, and sometimes competing, priorities.
Feeding 1.4 billion people. Avoiding the political trauma of famine. Ensuring food safety. Supporting farmers in a countryside that is aging and slowly emptying out. And at the same time responding to rising concerns about health, the environment, and biosecurity.
Over the next few episodes, we're going to zoom in on different parts of this system to see how those tensions play out in practice.
Like how for millions of migrant workers in a city, a rice paddy plot back home functions as something like a pension.
Lena Kaufmann 35:28
For many of them their fields that they still have their use rights to as being part of the rural population is really a key safety net also for these people.
Matthew 35:37
And what's really driving the rise of those multi-story pig farms?
Ron 35:42
When you look at a picture of those farms, you go, oh, it just looks like like a hotel, right. But on the end you'll see a bank of fans. You'll see pigs coming out and going in. They'll go up the elevator.
Matthew 35:55
That's next time on Feeding One in Six.
Thanks so much for listening. We'd love to know what questions this raised for you - about your own food system, or China's. Send us an email or a voice memo to podcast@tabledebates.org. We read and listen to everything.
And if you found this series valuable, the best thing you can do is share it with someone else, and leave us a review wherever you listen. It makes a real difference.
We'll share links in our show notes to the complete guide of 63 Chinese Cuisines put together by Chinese Cooking Demystified, Michelle King's book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, and Zhang Hongzhou's book Securing the Rice Bowl: China and Global Food Security. A full transcript is available on our website: tabledebates.org/
This series is a collaborative production between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust.
A huge thanks to the many people I asked so many questions to and have reviewed many earlier drafts. To name a few: Beibei Yin, Carmen Lee, Jack Thompson, Jackie Turner and Tara Garnett.
This series was produced, edited and hosted by me, Matthew Kessler. Support on mixing and sound design by Martin Palmqvist. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Talk to you next week.