Policy, institutional, economic, and technology trends shaping food and farming systems.
I. The Beginning In 2018, in a scattered village in Hong Kong’s New Territories that was slated for demolition at any moment, I baked my very first sourdough loaf using a jar of fermented dough I had just received from a friend. Looking back, it barely fermented at all. It…
Torrential rain, flooding, typhoons, droughts… Under the threat of climate change, farmers are invariably the first to bear the brunt of the damage. Yet what is often overlooked is that, in seeking to avert these losses, they are also the most proactive in taking adaptive measures. Last year, the International…
Those who have studied permaculture will likely be familiar with the name Sepp Holzer. As a pioneer in the field, Holzer is almost a household name in Austria, and his book *Holzer’s Permaculture* has long served as a foundational guide for enthusiasts worldwide. This June, I travelled to Krameterhof, the…
Foodthink Voices Foodthink has organised several reading groups focused on fermentation. While selecting books for these sessions, we realised: fermentation culture is thriving in international foodie circles, so why hasn’t it taken off here? This sentiment echoes the views of the fermentation publishing professionals featured in this article: China is…
Foodthink Says During the targeted poverty alleviation drive, and in an effort to rapidly secure prosperity for the peasantry, the government of Gong County (pseudonym) introduced greenhouse vegetable cultivation, a venture with strong market returns. Subsidy schemes were rolled out in a bid to integrate this crop into the livelihood…
Thriving industries form a vital foundation for rural revitalisation. Perhaps inspired by Shouguang in Shandong, the primary focus for agricultural development in rural areas across central and western China has often been the promotion of greenhouse vegetable cultivation. Gong County (a pseudonym) in the central region exemplifies this trend. A…
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…
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,…
In Yunnan, the annual mushroom season invariably sparks a collective frenzy with a distinctly ‘poisonous’ edge (and yes, we mean the actual toxicity of wild mushrooms). In recent years, as these fungi have crossed provincial borders and captured the wider public’s attention, the market has been shaken up each year…
Is the shift towards warmer and wetter conditions in China’s northwestern region a benefit or a detriment to local agriculture? The instinctive reaction among many is that increased moisture is a positive development for the arid inland northwest—after all, access to water means more crops can be cultivated. Yet the…
