Farmers’ markets, solidarity economies, community-supported agriculture, local food systems, and PGS.
From 2008, Cao Xiaohong built a group-buying circle for mums in a small Hunan town via Wotu Workshop; Xiao Yunsheng has sold veg at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market for over a decade. They reflect on building producer–consumer trust, and whether it can still withstand livestreaming and drop-shipping.
One-pot fried rice, claypot rice, pressure-cooker meals done in fifteen minutes, weekend braised meat portioned out for the week, workplace canteens, community canteens, little neighbourhood eateries, wet markets… Skip takeaway, and working people actually have plenty of ways to eat.
Muyunpo was founded in 2017 by the non-profit Shuguang in Xiaojin County, Sichuan’s Jiarong Tibetan region. Villagers’ groups set their own foraging and cultivation standards, with sales surpluses returned to the community at year-end—replacing the traditional purchasing system of price-suppressing traders and farmers at the market’s mercy.
Shu Shiwei, who spent a decade in the countryside, founded Green Sprout to document Taichung fruit growers’ stories of transformation. Each issue is printed in a thousand copies, most given away free; the magazine has sustained over 100 issues on reader sponsorship and unpaid contributions.
Among the more than ten ecological farms Foodthink visited, new-generation farmers bring wildly diverse professional backgrounds. Above the shared bottom line of no chemicals, from five mu of intensive cultivation to a garden-style life, every farm is the embodiment of its owner’s ideals.
In a small ranching town in Texas, Zhang Yiqing buys eggs directly from free-range backyard hens and small organic farmers, sidestepping supermarket purchase limits and price hikes. She believes decentralised local food systems are the real solution to the egg shortages intensive farming keeps causing.
Late April: the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market’s eleventh annual gathering at Zhongtuan Village ecological farm, Hengzhou. Traditional farmers, young returnees and volunteers brought their own tents, bowls and chopsticks beneath the banyan tree, huddling through shortfalls of people and money to sustain this urban–rural community of sustainable living.
CoopCycle brings together 67 cycle-delivery cooperatives from around the world, where riders are paid hourly and enjoy paid leave, with no algorithmic monitoring or dynamic pricing, operating on the democratic principle of “one person, one vote”.
A Community-Supported Agriculture farm in Fengxian, Shanghai—20 mu of arable land held up by four farmhands in their seventies, members unwilling to share yield-loss risks, organic fertiliser still bought in—three months of farm life have reconciled ecological farming’s ideals with its realities, entry by entry.
Tusheng Shiguan’s ingredients come mostly from Yang Lifen and her husband’s nearly ten-mu ecological garden in Qujing. This fourteen-year-old Kunming shop, born of group-buying among public-interest friends, weathered falling footfall and a team cut from twelve to three, true to its Slow Food philosophy: “Tend slowly, grow slowly.”
