Species protection, ecosystem change, and habitat loss.
Fifty years ago, half of every million wild salmon swimming toward the Atlantic completed their return migration; now only 30,000 do, while some 400 million are penned in Norwegian fish pens. The journey from gravel riverbed to deep sea and back upstream is nearing its end.
During three months pulling weeds, catching insects and raising seedlings at Xiqing Farm in Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi—participant in Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme—came to realise that the moments when body and land are honestly joined are far more precious than the harvest itself.
Foodthink and Beiye Books’ online book-club on Vanishing Foods: from the Ark of Taste, with 6,592 endangered varieties, and Norway’s Doomsday Vault, to Wangjingzhuang, Shexian, Hebei farmer Liu Yurong letting a Little White common bean idle for eight or nine years take root again in the Taihang Mountains.
On the edge of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, farmer Louis spent 16 years transforming a banana monoculture into an agroforestry “forest”; philosophy graduate Zhang Zhiwei, who laboured on African and Brazilian farms for nearly a year, now plans to bring this method back to Yunnan.
Zou Lei, a Minzu University of China doctoral student, finds through Yunnan fieldwork that Tall-legged, Frizzled Black-boned and other local breeds vanish one by one under the twin pressures of the migrant-labour exodus and imported broilers, severing the breeds Miao betrothals and the Yi Torch Festival depend on.
In an exclusive interview with Foodthink at the 3rd International Agrobiodiversity Congress, veteran BBC journalist Dan Saladino moves from Sichuan Red-Mouth Glutinous Rice to the revival of British farmhouse cheese and the Perry pear, discussing how to safeguard diversity in the industrial food system.
On World Rainforest Day, Foodthink has compiled over a hundred reader comments via Jieshengzhi on “Fake Meat” Drives Out the Real Thing: from “Brazil’s deforestation has nothing to do with us” to “Forest-burning concerns every creature”, laying bare the full consumer-side divide over imported beef’s environmental cost.
A joint investigation by Repórter Brasil and Hong Kong Free Press found that four Hong Kong-based companies purchased beef offal from 163 Beef, a slaughterhouse that repeatedly bought cattle from the Heller family farm, charged with deforesting 6,500 hectares.
On World Book Day, Foodthink brings together recommendations from its editors, authors and fellow travellers in the field — over ten books that, unbidden, converge on the most fundamental connection between people and food, land and the natural environment.
Repórter Brasil built a traceability database combining satellite data and on-the-ground collaboration with indigenous communities, proving JBS was not “unable to trace” but actively used three-legged journeys to launder cattle from deforested ranches into the supply chain, ultimately prompting six major European chain supermarkets to boycott.
