Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
Former high-school maths teacher Lü Lu spent three months interning at Xiqing Farm in Daxing, Beijing. Working with the earth each day, she found years of troublesome allergies finally gone – and learned to keep the growth of thirty-odd crops constantly on her mind.
At Pengcheng Natural Farm in Yinlin Village, Conghua—pruning lychee branches, leaving grass to nourish the soil, reduced tillage and less fertilising—these everyday labours of Natural Farming were four gifts of letting go, simplicity, relaxation and acceptance from an ecological agriculture internship.
Twenty-four years after its ban, “lean-meat powder” is still detectable in pork, and residues of hormones such as trenbolone and metandienone are almost absent from food safety spot-check lists—behind athletes’ positive doping tests lie hidden risks of everyday hormone ingestion for ordinary people.
Researching tomato flavours, American writer Chris St. Cavish found that ingredient quality is already determined the moment a seed is chosen; China’s rice varieties have shrunk from 46,000 to 1,000, yet living seeds in farmers’ hands still guard the last of that diversity.
Ecologist Zou Yi at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University finds that land consolidation reduces natural enemy richness in rice paddies, driven by the loss of linear habitats such as field bunds and irrigation channels. She recommends rebuilding these semi-natural habitats and considering the economic and ecological costs of insecticides.
Wang Xiaoyi, Chinese translator of Seeing Like a State and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, traces the three stages of Scott’s reception in China, the historical “loosen–tighten–loosen–tighten” cycle between state planning and grassroots spontaneity, and the confidence grassroots adaptive change brings after project failure.
Foodthink, together with Sanlian Academic, Yali and the Peasant Seed Network, hosted a series of Seed Empire book-launch talks in five cities, where researchers, returning farmers and university scholars discussed how Monsanto and agricultural capital intervene in public scientific discourse.
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.
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.
