Introductions, activities, progress updates, participant records, and reviews related to the Lianhe Programme.
I.Leaving it All Behind to Farm On an ordinary morning, walking into the passion fruit fields, I saw vines heavy with golden fruit. The saplings we’d planted at the end of March were already yielding a second flush of blooms, and bees hard at work with pollination hummed steadily around…
This March, carrying a blend of uncertainty about my future career and anticipation for the unknown, I joined Foodthink’s “Eco-Farming Internship Programme” and arrived at Le Xian Gu Community Farm in Fengxian District, Shanghai. Until then, my image of a farm had been shaped entirely by the fields, lawns, and…
The Amazon rainforest is vanishing at a rate of several million hectares a year. Over the first two decades of the 21st century, deforestation across Brazil’s Amazon region totalled 44 million hectares—larger than China’s Yunnan Province. Livestock expansion is the primary driver of illegal deforestation: low-cost pastureland and feed have…
Summer arrives, and with it, another season for watermelon. Watermelons are inseparable from summer, just as the farmers behind the fruit evolve alongside their crop. Wherever there is land, you will find the watermelon farmers of Taizhou. Their history of enterprise dates back to the 1980s, forming another chapter in…
Foodthink says “In search of childhood flavours” has become a popular theme over the past two years. This article’s protagonist, the ‘White Rabbit Child’ melon, embodies the “childhood sweetness” widely preserved in the memories of Guanzhong’s people. This heritage variety has been cultivated since the collective economy era, with farmers…
Editor’s Note Few culinary traditions are as strictly bound by religion and woven into the fabric of ethnic life as Halal. After spending time with Muslim friends from northwest China, I realised that once they leave predominantly Muslim regions to work in the south, their options for affordable Halal dining…
Selected work of the 2024 Foodthink Lianhe Creative Programme“Fake Meat” Ousts Real Meat: Dining Tables, Herders and the AmazonThe English version has been officially published on Sixth Tone (澎湃新闻’s English-language platform). It has been slightly abridged from the original draft. We thank Sixth Tone’s editors and our readers for their…
Foodthink Says On 16 February, Foodthink hosted an in-person session for “Fake Meat Drives Out Real Meat”, a shortlisted piece from the Lianhe Creative Project. The event invited the author and discussion guests to engage in a lively exchange on the impact of imported meat and the future of traditional…
Every garden has a theory of beauty and a morality of happiness. — Santiago Belloc, Philosophy in the Garden It is somewhat serendipitous that my path to ecological farming began with “weeds”.First, weeds as a problem. As a sociology and anthropology student, I spent nearly a year conducting field research…
A Note from Foodthink Termitomyces mushrooms, known locally as “Summer Solstice Mushrooms” in Shaoguan, Guangdong, have become a culinary trend in recent years, sparking a foraging frenzy across northern Guangdong. CaiCai and Dayan from the “Chunchao Springflut” studio ventured into Yao communities and inadvertently found themselves among the ranks of…
