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Paper short abstract

This self-ethnography follows my shift from urban consumer to Beijing CSA intern. Through “entangled” encounters with insects, birds, and cats, I show that honestly narrating multispecies confusion is public anthropology, redirecting attention to eating ethics.

Paper long abstract

This paper presents a self-ethnography of my immersive participation in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in Beijing. As an urban consumer accustomed to the standardized produce of supermarkets, I entered this space not as a detached researcher but as a intern, using my own body and emotions as the primary tools of inquiry. This study documents my visceral journey of sensory and ethical recalibration, focusing on the concrete dilemmas that arose from daily multispecies encounters. I trace the transformation of my relationship with the farm’s insects, from an initial disgust toward “pests” to a hesitant observation of them as fellow inhabitants. I delve into the profound ethical paralysis I experienced when confronted with fallen magpie fledglings and roaming stray cats, moments that forced me to confront the limits of human agency within an ecological community. Furthermore, I contrast the therapeutic experience found in manual farmwork with the “affective labor” required to sustain member relations, revealing the often-unseen work that upholds alternative food networks.

I argue that the methodological practice of “staying with the trouble” by honestly narrating confusion and tension constitutes, in itself, a potent form of public anthropology. This self-ethnography invites the public into the lived, muddy reality of ethical food production, where the simple binary of “good” and “bad” collapses. Thus, the paper demonstrates how personal, embodied narrative can “re-educate public attention,” shifting discourse away from abstract consumer choice and toward a more complex, relational, and multispecies imagination of what “ethical eating” truly means.