Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Earlier this spring, before visiting Sister Yan Ping’s “Happy Fruit and Herb Garden” in Guigang, Guangxi, I harboured a mistaken assumption that the farm lay remote from civilisation and enjoyed a pristine ecological setting. In reality, however, it is surrounded by conventional orchards, where pesticides, chemical fertilisers and herbicides are…
At the end of 2020, I left the non-profit organisation where I had worked for over seven years. I wanted to try a way of working that was independent of any institutional structure and allowed for a relatively balanced state of body, mind, and intellect, while also seeking a lifestyle…
Leaving from Beijing Chaoyang Station, we took a little over an hour on the high-speed rail to Pingquan North Station in Chengde, Hebei Province. Yingying Ren, the matriarch of Lianxiang Farm, was already waiting for us outside the station. Yingying is petite, with her hair swept back in a neat,…
As noted in the first instalment of the *Woren Valley Food Philosophy* series, a single pot of soup for White Dew calls for ten ingredients, nine of which are homegrown. I champion “self-sufficiency” as the ideal for valley life. On paper, our self-sufficiency rate appears to sit at a lofty…
Before starting my internship at Letian Bay Farm, I often pictured the customers here as a bunch of dedicated environmentalists. Otherwise, how could one explain why city dwellers would make the trek out to the countryside? In an age when everyone is rushing towards urban centres, going against the current…
Early autumn finally brought Evil Man Valley its first entirely self-reliant harvest since the community began. The emphasis on “self-reliant” is deliberate: it means handling every detail personally, from transplanting the seedlings to cutting the crop, managing the entire process single-handedly. I moved into Evil Man Valley in June…
Departing Xizhimen and passing through Nankou, the high-speed train crosses the high peaks of the Yanshan Mountains before reaching the Huailai Basin. Though less than an hour from Beijing, the landscape is entirely different: wide, flat plains, sprawling cornfields and vineyards, dotted with the massive towers of wind turbines. The…
Before winding eastwards into Beijing’s urban centre, the Yongding River traces a series of U-shaped bends through the hills. The villages of Longjiazhuang and Shuiyuzui lie on opposite banks, linked by a single road bridge. From 29 July to 2 August, extreme rainfall across the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region caused the Yongding…
In Russian, summer is also known as “dacha season”. Maxim Gorky wrote a short play that was translated into Chinese as *The Summer Visitors*; its original Russian title, *Dachniki*, is more literally rendered as “Dacha Dwellers”—in 1995, the same story was adapted into a film titled *Summer People*. The dacha…
Foodthink Says In 1924, Fei Dasheng, along with teachers and students from the Jiangsu Provincial Women’s Sericulture School, arrived in Kaixiangong Village, Wujiang County, to found the Silk Improvement Society. Nearly a century has passed since then. Later, his younger brother, Fei Xiaotong, wove the society’s experiences into his doctoral…
