Urban growing, community gardens, balcony/rooftop farming, and urban food practices.
Last April, we moved our Hangzhou studio to the ground floor of an older residential compound with a certain sense of history, gaining a small courtyard in the process. A narrow band of soil runs around the yard; positioned at the front and facing south, it gets excellent sunlight. Though…
Two years ago, I moved to a financial news outlet to cover agriculture full-time. I had hoped it would bring me closer to the land and to food itself, forging a fresh connection between journalism and the realities of daily life. Unlike food writers who dwell on flavour, I reported…
Meeting Nichole was when I first began to grasp just how dire the state of modern food and living environments has become. In the United States, expanses of immaculately manicured front lawns are nothing short of an environmental catastrophe. According to the environmental group Friends of the Earth, Americans spray…
I grew up in New York City and have loved pickles of all kinds since childhood. I never imagined that those delicious, crisp, garlic-infused pickles would one day set me on a path of discovery and exploration. In truth, alongside pickles, fermented foods such as bread, cheese, yoghurt, sour cream,…
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…
