Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Foodthink Says Since its launch in 2003, Taiwan’s *Qingyao’er* bimonthly magazine has chronicled sustainable food and agriculture practices across the Straits and internationally, inspiring and shaping a generation of practitioners in the field. How did the story of *Qingyao’er* begin? How has a publication that pays no contributors and runs…
Foodthink Says On 7 March, Foodthink published an article titled *Farmland Polluted by Plastic Mulch Film, Absurd Buck-Passing Between Authorities*, documenting a farmer’s predicament: his fields were contaminated by plastic mulch film discharged during processing by a neighbouring enterprise. Yet the local ecological environment bureau and agriculture and rural affairs…
Selected work of the 2024 Foodthink Lianhe Creative Programme“Fake Meat” Ousts Real Meat: Dining Tables, Herders and the AmazonThe English version has been officially published on Sixth Tone (澎湃新闻’s English-language platform). It has been slightly abridged from the original draft. We thank Sixth Tone’s editors and our readers for their…
Foodthink Says 21 March is International Forest Day, with this year’s theme, “Forests: A Valuable Source of Food”. Yet on the other side of the world, Brazil’s beef industry continues to expand at the cost of felled forests and lost biodiversity. Faced with international demands to halt deforestation, major meat…
I. The Seed Bottleneck Farmers in Guzai Yao Ethnic Township, Mashan County, north of Nanning, saw their incomes rise sharply from growing chayote seedlings. Yet since last year, they have found themselves with nothing left to plant. 2024 brought multiple spells of extreme rainfall to Guangxi. In Mashan, the relentless…
In the 2025 Spring Festival release *Ne Zha 2*, the leopard demon Shen Xiaobao won over audiences with his witty and endearing portrayal. Yet, his grievous injuries and uncertain fate in the film bring to mind the endangered North China leopard (*Panthera pardus japonensis*) of the real world. This subspecies,…
I. The Sudden Mulch Film Crisis Spring ploughing is imminent, yet Li Jidong, a farmer in Nuomizhuang Village, Luancheng City, Hebei, finds himself unable to till his land. Scattered across his 70-mu (approximately 11.5 acres) field are fragments of plastic mulch of all sizes, blown in from a neighbouring operation.…
Foodthink Says On 16 February, Foodthink hosted an in-person session for “Fake Meat Drives Out Real Meat”, a shortlisted piece from the Lianhe Creative Project. The event invited the author and discussion guests to engage in a lively exchange on the impact of imported meat and the future of traditional…
Foodthink Commentary Ahead of the Spring Festival, Ren Yingying, a post-90s farmer from Lianxiang Farm in Chengde, Hebei, was invited by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to Berlin for the Global Forum on Agriculture, Food, Nutrition and the Environment (GFFA), where she helped draft a position paper…
Every garden has a theory of beauty and a morality of happiness. — Santiago Belloc, Philosophy in the Garden It is somewhat serendipitous that my path to ecological farming began with “weeds”.First, weeds as a problem. As a sociology and anthropology student, I spent nearly a year conducting field research…
