At Meet Farm in Meishan, Chen Ying replaces pesticides and chemical fertilisers with rice-duck pest control and kitchen-waste composting. Across forty mu, she grows and raises everything herself – the only food that needs to be bought in is salt.
Tanker trucks loaded edible soybean oil without cleaning; even public attention can hardly break industry collusion. New mothers, facing pesticide-treated fruit and baby formula ingredient lists, feel even more at a loss. Keeping food sources within a knowable, controllable range has become the most realistic response.
Stir-frying spans only a few centuries; iron woks and refined oil are both recent arrivals. The real excess is high-temperature refined oil, not natural fats in nuts and the like. Skipping stir-frying is much like barefoot running: a way of living that returns to our evolutionary instincts.
In Yulin, Chengdu, Xia Lili has set up a community small dining table with traceable, farm-direct ingredients, giving a group long reliant on takeaway a reason to pick up their rice bowls again. Some have regained their appetite; others, their motivation to get up on time.
A Nature Communications serum study of 5,696 people across 15 provinces found 74 environmental hazardous chemicals at high detection rates, closely linked to 12 chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity; China’s blood residue levels of organochlorine pesticides and PFASs are significantly higher than in other countries.
The Lianhe Creative Programme, launched by Foodthink with several public-interest and media partners, received 100 applications. Selected projects span food and agriculture topics — contracted watermelon farmers, imported beef and lamb on herders’ tables, agricultural drones, wet markets’ fight for survival — with works published gradually throughout October.
At Yinlin Village, Taiping Town, Conghua, Guangzhou, Sister Hu’s 400-plus lychee trees yielded over 8,000 jin last year — this year, not even 100. At Pengcheng Ecological Farm, 200-plus trees produced just a dozen or so lychees. Prices up several times over still cannot recoup the costs.
Brandenburg’s rainfall is 30% below the national average. The Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development has introduced broad beans, chickpeas and other overwintering crops into trial plots at organic farms, recommending farmers gradually shift from the three-summer-two-winter to the three-winter-two-summer rotation.
A shop manager demoted by a single system message; shop assistants grinding non-stop under the commands of 70-odd tasks and 30-odd cameras. Bianlifeng, which handed all decision-making to algorithms, has shrunk from nearly 3,000 stores to just over 1,000.
In Eren Valley, Fujian, Kouzi’s trial-planted onions this spring rotted almost entirely in the field. His carefully prepared winter wheat set not a single grain after daily rain during anthesis. Self-sufficiency dashed – yet he says he’ll still plant.