Guanzhong’s old-variety muskmelon Baituwa, passed down for decades by farmers saving their own seed, has now retreated from city shelves under the pressure of large-scale cultivation and e-commerce sales, glimpsed only occasionally at rural markets.
Eight years after moving from Xiji, Ningxia to Shenzhen, Ma Lan, a Hui girl, has almost no halal options beyond Lanzhou lamian restaurants. Cooking and eating alone, all she really wants is a dining companion to share meals with.
Gannan herders call imported grain-fed meat “fake meat,” yet with local yak prices steadily falling since 2020 — a single adult yak fetches just over 6,000 yuan — many are forced to buy “fake meat” themselves.
Research Fellow Wang Xiaoyi (Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) unpacks the contradiction between pasture-fattened yaks that “can’t fetch a fair price” and local meat that herders “can’t afford”. After marketisation “disembedded” beef and mutton from pastoral life, he asks how to “re-embed” them into the community.
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.
Qiaoyi’s family in Ruyuan, Shaoguan, moved from the deep Nanling Mountains to beside Danxia Airport. In summer, colony after colony of wild termite mushrooms lets the Guoshan Yao carry on their days living with the mountains and forests in the gaps of urbanisation.
Zejun refused the mainstream path of life. In spring 2024, a three-month internship at Guixinyuan Farm in Huizhou, Guangdong—from weeding and feeding ducks to visiting multiple farms across the two Guangs—gradually revealed that ecological agriculture has no standard answer but a spectrum.
Sangje, a herder settled in the county town driving a sanitation truck, cannot afford his own yak meat—he boils imported frozen meat with sheep intestines in one pot. Cheap JBS-chain beef is driving live livestock prices into loss, from Gannan to Brazil, and burning the Amazon’s forests.
A Foodthink intern at Zhiliangtian Ecological Farm in Alxa confronts the risks of farming at the mercy of the weather and the frictions of communal living — yet among the plants, birds, and beasts beneath the Helan Mountains, discovers the quiet confidence to keep tending the land.
Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme sent five young people to Lüwo Farm in Jingyang, Shaanxi, where their days went far beyond planting vegetables and pulling weeds — raising seedlings, driving a tractor, working on the biscuit production line, attending biodynamic farming classes.