Foodthink and Beiye Books’ online book-club on Vanishing Foods: from the Ark of Taste, with 6,592 endangered varieties, and Norway’s Doomsday Vault, to Wangjingzhuang, Shexian, Hebei farmer Liu Yurong letting a Little White common bean idle for eight or nine years take root again in the Taihang Mountains.
Videos of Zhejiang and Shanghai incineration plants “competing for waste” across provinces and municipalities went viral. But waste management advocates point out that overcapacity is the reality – legally mandated dioxin data, tested only once a year, is far from “real-time monitoring”.
Kouzi, a farmer at the Valley of Villains, accompanied her parents through their final four and forty-four days in the ICU. She has since signed an advance directive, refusing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a mechanical ventilator and oesophageal tube feeding – fighting for a natural farewell not blocked by instruments.
On the edge of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, farmer Louis spent 16 years transforming a banana monoculture into an agroforestry “forest”; philosophy graduate Zhang Zhiwei, who laboured on African and Brazilian farms for nearly a year, now plans to bring this method back to Yunnan.
A post-90s couple, An Tian and San Qi, returned to Zhaixia Village, Longyan, Fujian, to grow passion fruit. Surrounding terraced fields were stained a withered yellow by the villagers’ herbicide, yet little by little they turned textbook Natural Farming into a way of getting along with this land.
A former agriculture reporter covered feed market prices and live hog shipments for two and a half years – yet stories mostly came from listed companies’ earnings, and food was always just figures. Renting a plot, chasing abscessed pork: neither closed the gap between commercial framing and the field.
Amid Beijing’s torrential rains and heatwaves this summer, Meituan, Ele.me and JD riders had feet soaked raw, suffered heat stroke and rear-end collisions – yet attendance bonus and late-delivery penalties still forced them to run orders in the rain.
At Mondeggi commons, over 450 members collectively farm 1,800 mu of land and deliberate democratically; Genuino Clandestino uses independent certification to bypass official procedures. These communities extend agroecology from a cultivation technique into collective action fighting for land and food sovereignty.
Pu’er’s coffee farmers, tossed by global prices for over a decade — felling trees for tea, then scrambling back — now see record highs. Yet the surge stems from Brazil’s cuts, extreme weather still disrupts flowering, and they are turning to value-added processing and ecological cultivation for a steadier path.
Riders eat just twice a day, pushing through peak delivery hours on biscuits and flatbread snacks. Medical studies across multiple countries show that the dietary imbalance and chronic stress wrought by intense delivery work are driving up gig workers’ risk of depression, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
