Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
The SCA flavour wheel’s reference foods skew towards Europe and North America, and woody and earthy flavours are labelled as negative, placing producing regions in Indonesia and India under pressure. Developing local flavour wheels and trusting your own tongue is a freer way to enjoy coffee.
In early summer 2020, Zhang Xiaoshu first tasted kombucha fermented with Chinese tea at a friend’s by the Drum Tower. Three years on, she, tea friends Shuyu and Kiwon, and a growing circle passed cultures, blind-tasted, and guarded connection through a jar of fermentation amid lockdowns and scattering.
After the lockdown lifted, quilts, cured provisions and pickled vegetables lined every street in this small town in the Anhui region north of the Yangtze; the family followed Mother’s seasonal rhythm — frying meat balls, curing pork — drying out all fear and darkness, and met Grandfather’s passing too.
Since 2014, Ma Lan—head of the Forest Kindergarten at Friends of Nature Gaia Nature School—has led city children through the whole farming year, from loosening the soil to cooking, helping them rediscover food and themselves through stomping on fallen leaves, playing with stones and sowing seeds.
Jianwen takes us back to his mother’s hearth and his uncle’s herb garden, unveiling the food wisdom behind over a hundred varieties of wild greens and heritage pigs that take two years to mature – a Lisu family living in symbiosis with the mountain.
