When we walk into a supermarket or market every day, or open a shopping app or food delivery platform on our phones to buy milk, meat or pre-prepared meals, it feels as though there are endless options. However, from the perspective of the global supply chain, the…
Brazil is a major global producer of food and meat, known as “the world’s breadbasket.” It is also among the largest consumers of pesticides and fertilizers. The beef we eat on a daily basis is very likely to have come from there. Over the past decade or…
In late August, Xu Lingni (a pseudonym) discovered that the 10 chickens and 2 geese kept on the hillside had gone missing. It was a chicken-keeping cooperative founded by staff and students at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, based at the Huxi Campus in the western suburbs of Chongqing.…
City life carries us ever further from the land, but have you ever considered another possibility? In Chinese, the character for life (生) is composed of the characters for person (人) and earth (土). Three young women — Suli Liu, Yuyuan Ma, and Shuzhi Wang —…
Cabbage soaked in formaldehyde, bayberries soaked in pesticides, and going back further, melamine-tainted milk powder and New Orleans-style chicken wings laced with Sudan Red dye… Time and again, food news shocks the public with a scandal. Seeing these stories, a lot of people’s first reaction is probably…
Between March and August this year, I made several trips to Tianxingzhou and the Lüdāo residential area in Wuhan. Situated in the suburbs of Hongshan District, Tianxingzhou is a river island surrounded on all sides by water. It has a history of watermelon cultivation stretching back more than a century…
On a mid-river island that flourishes with the waters yet is swallowed by them, how do melon farmers come to terms with an increasingly erratic climate—or are they destined only to be forgotten, to be displaced? ◉A path on the river sand, November 2022 What lies…
1 Who’s doing gig work? When Zhang Dandan, a professor at Peking University, said that ‘flexibility itself is a benefit,’ I was deep in the remote forests of the Greater Khingan Range, struggling forward with a group of gig workers picking pinecones. Their job was…
Foodthink Says In the box-office hit <em>Ox Come</em>, Ox Come and Bao La are close friends who grow up side by side. But deep in the Taihang Mountains, in the habitat of the Chinese leopard, the relationship between leopards, cattle and people is far more complex. Thanks to the…
We seem to love talking about wet markets more than ever before. Visiting the wet market has become an essential part of travel. Wet market photography and guided market tours are trending on social media, while cafés, florists and stand-up comedy acts are moving into newly renovated…
