I. Branches laden with lychees Until my father sent me a photo on his phone of the branches heavy with lychees, I had never once thought of going back home to help sell them. My hometown is Lufeng City in Guangdong Province, where our family tends a lychee grove covering…
Farmer Sun Wenxiang stood barefoot in the concrete courtyard to greet us, his feet broad and weathered. It was early July in Hongya County, Meishan City, Sichuan Province, and a series of heavy downpours had just moved through. These marked a rare few days of respite from the seasonal workload.…
The gardenias are just beginning to bloom in the mountain ravine. My flowers have finally opened. June 16, a month ago, marked the anniversary of Evil Man Valley. By 2025, it will be the fourth. The modest patch at the front of the house provides more than enough for self-sufficiency,…
Since early June, a video titled “From a City Besieged by Waste to Not Enough Waste to Burn: China’s Speed Leaves the West Bewildered” has spread rapidly online. The notion of simply tossing unsightly rubbish into incinerators for a thorough burn, then harnessing the released energy for electricity, has left…
Epigraph As a generation born after the 1990s, we rode the waves of marketisation and commercialisation, experiencing the vibrant, dazzling world they ushered in. Unlike our parents’ generation, who were mostly born to farm and did nearly everything by hand, we outsourced the bulk of our daily clothing, necessities, and…
Foodthink Says The ongoing saga of rice “shortages” and soaring prices in Japanese supermarkets has stretched from last summer to this one. Despite repeated government interventions, prices refused to drop. Instead, the crisis intensified, earning the media moniker the “Reiwa Rice Turmoil”. Japanese consumers were up in arms, and farmers…
Recently, someone quipped that McDonald’s has transformed into an unfeeling ‘middle-aged’ entity, having traded its childlike wonder and youthful vigour for the drab routine of a canteen catering to wage labourers. Yet in truth, McDonald’s has never been short of such workers. I found myself genuinely taken aback, and suspect…
Foodthink Says “Stories about food are the best stories we can tell.” This is what Dan Saladino, a senior BBC correspondent, said in an interview with Foodthink at the Third International Congress on Agricultural Biodiversity this past May. Saladino specialises in food and agriculture journalism. Over the past decade, he…
Foodthink Says “Half the year we bake, the other half we drown.” Farmers across parts of Guangxi are weathering unprecedented natural disasters. It started with an once-in-sixty-years drought. From November last year to April this year, average rainfall across Guangxi fell nearly 70 per cent short of the long-term average,…
This episode of Food Talk features an impromptu conversation recorded at ‘Jishi’, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market’s physical space at Sanyuanqiao. We’ve welcomed back two old friends: Kang Li and Jin Peng. One is a Yi woman from Chuxiong, Yunnan, who funded her studies by selling mountain mushrooms and matsutake.…
