Farmers’ markets, solidarity economies, community-supported agriculture, local food systems, and PGS.
In Texas, a home kitchen can legally sell homemade baked goods after completing a $15 online hygiene course. Zhang Yiqing began there, aiming to build organic food exchanges among neighbours and asking what kind of food law leaves room for small producers.
Joya, formerly head of Fairtrade International’s China office, experienced firsthand the predicament of trading companies monopolising cooperative decision-making and Western standards frequently misaligning with rural Chinese realities, as she helped farmers obtain Fairtrade certification and connect with overseas markets.
Six months on, cook Xia Lili’s community kitchen in Yulin, Chengdu has knit her meal companions, pot by pot. A burst pipe led a neighbour to take them all in; a new arrival wrote their song. This all-female crew’s table is now a pillar in each life.
The Monsanto biography Empire of Seeds uses data to debunk the GM myth. Chinese scholars and practitioners—Tian Le, Guan Qi, Xu Zhun, Zhou Mujun among them—discuss: GM has neither reduced pesticide use nor raised yields. Can farmers and consumers re-engage with breeding and food networks?
Qin Xianrong, a 1990s-born returnee, has farmed 60 mu of sloping land in Dadu’gang, Xishuangbanna, for four years—growing pineapples, passion fruit and macadamia nuts almost wild, no chemical fertiliser, pesticide or watering. Amid rubber plantations and tea gardens, he explores a way of reconnecting with the land.
At Meet Farm in Meishan, Chen Ying replaces pesticides and chemical fertilisers with rice-duck pest control and kitchen-waste composting. Across forty mu, she grows and raises everything herself – the only food that needs to be bought in is salt.
In Yulin, Chengdu, Xia Lili has set up a community small dining table with traceable, farm-direct ingredients, giving a group long reliant on takeaway a reason to pick up their rice bowls again. Some have regained their appetite; others, their motivation to get up on time.
From the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, cooperatives have connected members at both consumption and production ends for 180 years. Foodthink gathers cooperative practices in food and agriculture worldwide, tracing this movement’s paths to health, fairness and sustainability in the ‘food empire’s’ gaps.
Hu Xuemei, a Pidu District farmer, went from water-protection volunteer to turning her family’s fields into a diverse, finely tended ecological farm and setting up farming-based arts-education classes with an art teacher. After half a lifetime passively running a household, she became the master of her own life.
Xia Lili cooks for her meal companions in Yulin, Chengdu – a bowl of pa pa cai boiled in plain water, no oil, no salt, ten grains cooked into one pot of rice – bringing farmer friends, bodies and the land back to the same table.
