Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
Mercosur and the EU formally signed their free trade agreement after nearly ten thousand farmers hurled potatoes at EU headquarters in Brussels. Grain-price trauma, double environmental standards and transition costs stack up—fairly, who bears the cost of green transition? China’s low-carbon agriculture faces the same question.
A small strip of clay by the courtyard wall of our Hangzhou studio: after seven batches of hot compost made from saved kitchen scraps and coffee grounds, the ground, hard as rammed earth, has loosened into black soil that opens with a single spade.
Yu Jiangang and his wife Mei Yuhui made silk duvets in Zhenghebang for over a decade. An osmanthus silkworm poisoning in autumn 2024 led him to lease 14 mu of rice paddies – from seedling to Lidong harvest, four rounds of hand-weeding, a nearly 180-day life cycle complete.
The last dish in Foodthink’s New Year recipe collection: Ujimqin sheep from Dulan’s family of Harigobi herders in East Ujimqin Banner, Inner Mongolia, raised through four-season transhumance—clear-simmered with salt alone until the meat is fall-apart tender.
The large-scale monoculture of the Plantationocene has dismantled ecosystems and rural communities, yet the traditions of care in the Qimin Yaoshu and Xu Guangqi’s Nongzheng Quanshu suggest that “non-plantation” farming can still become imaginable once more.
Shandong native Kouzi’s sixth winter in rural Fujian: from rocket stove kang to old granary turned warm room, from radish soup to dried pumpkin, the south’s damp cold at last gives way to ease.
Saturday 7 February: eight Foodthink members take over Jishi, the community veg shop at Sanyuanqiao, swapping writing for veg selling. Join us in person or online for a year-end report, food and agriculture sharing session, Chinese New Year live shopping, and a film screening with lamb soup dinner.
Farmer Kou Yanding of Villain Valley, Fujian, has sued Baidu at the Beijing Internet Court, alleging its AI fabricated an extortion charge against her — the first documented AI defamation case in China.
Chen Jingjing, a 20-year researcher of rural construction, worked a paddy for the first time this year in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou—no herbicide, sun-drying. Rice cost over 30 yuan a jin, and he also hit a hard wall woven from land rent, hired labour and the division of labour.
In a sixteenth-century manor in western France, a 1970s hippie couple sustains self-sufficiency through work-exchange volunteers. A month with a Colombian brother and sister—undocumented workers—picking strawberries, smashing walls, making cheese: the “return to the countryside” romantic imaginings shattered by day after day of unpaid manual labour.
