From the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, cooperatives have connected members at both consumption and production ends for 180 years. Foodthink gathers cooperative practices in food and agriculture worldwide, tracing this movement’s paths to health, fairness and sustainability in the ‘food empire’s’ gaps.
From volunteer teaching in Shaanxi to promoting ecological agriculture training in Guangxi, Huang Guoliang (Lao Liu) co-founded the Y.C. James Yen Rural Reconstruction Academy and the Little Donkey Community Farm, advocating coexistence and mutual learning between ecological and conventional agriculture rather than irreconcilability.
Hu Xuemei, a Pidu District farmer, went from water-protection volunteer to turning her family’s fields into a diverse, finely tended ecological farm and setting up farming-based arts-education classes with an art teacher. After half a lifetime passively running a household, she became the master of her own life.
In Japanese, “soba” and “beside me” are homophones — housewarming noodles for neighbours, toshikoshi soba on Ōmisoka, enduring customs. In Nagano, the heart of soba country, from Jōmon-era famine porridge to Edo peddlers’ cries, this bowl’s journey hides in the everyday.
Unhappy that the old 32-square-metre house blocked the sun, Grandma Kouzi shrank to fifteen square metres in Wicked Valley, Fujian, from two old granaries. Rocket stove linked to heated kang wards off southern damp-cold; freezer-door skylights let in light and breeze. Eating, drinking, toileting, reading, exercise — all fits.
Two interns set off from Guixinyuan Farm, visiting five ecological farms across Guangdong and Guangxi, repeatedly recalibrating between the ease of Natural Farming and the pressures of yields, lease terms and labour – ultimately affirming the ideal of a Half-farming, Half-X life.
With over a decade in the villages – growing rice, raising chickens, brewing green plum wine, running rural tourism – Huang Yajun of Conghua’s Deep Cultivation centre offers, after multiple setbacks, a practitioner’s response to the academic judgement that rural work runs counter to modernisation.
Farmer Kouzi conflated the Yellow Gourd Beetle with fireflies because its common name contains “Ying”, and in fury kicked a drifting firefly—only afterwards learning that “Ying” (lustrous) and “Ying” (firefly) are entirely unrelated.
Xia Lili cooks for her meal companions in Yulin, Chengdu – a bowl of pa pa cai boiled in plain water, no oil, no salt, ten grains cooked into one pot of rice – bringing farmer friends, bodies and the land back to the same table.
In Zhaizi Village, Jianyang, Sichuan, Senior Agronomist Yuan Yong teaches smallholders the no-till cover method for growing rice hands-on. A few aunties and uncles sit round discussing whether it suits their plots; Grandpa Jiang decides on the spot to set aside two fen of land to try it.
