Foodthink Says In the final episode of the recently acclaimed drama Blossoms Shanghai, protagonist Bao Zong quotes a famous line from Gone with the Wind — “Only land remains eternal” — before retiring to the fields of Chuansha on Shanghai’s outskirts. Had his plot not been sold to Disney or…
“Save our rice!” “IRRI, get out!” In October 2023, these furious chants echoed across several Filipino farmer protest rallies. The demonstrations took direct aim at the Sixth International Rice Congress, hosted by the International Rice Research Institute (hereafter IRRI). Against the backdrop of climate change and the drive to cut…
Foodthink Author Kouzi Endurance walker and farmer, village brewer. Full-time food lover, part-time farmer, amateur writer. Regular readers will likely have noticed by now: I don’t stir-fry. Yes, Evildoers’ Valley doesn’t even own a wok. Admittedly, my one-square-metre kitchen is fully equipped with appliances — a saucepan,…
Grandpa was the fourth child in his family. Born in 1933, he lost his mother in early childhood and his father in his youth, weathering famine and disaster. He was always a farmer, though he also worked at one stage as a cotton carder. In his final years, he dreamed…
In 2016, I had a few rather unsuccessful shopping trips to Sanyuanli Market. I only recently made my way back, drawn by the exhibition and the urge to check in, only to find it had long since settled on its new identity: an art scene. Seven years on, Sanyuanli has…
In Part One of “Internship Notes from a Desert Oasis”, I attempted to revert to my instincts as a business journalist, examining the operational struggles faced by ecological farms. Yet, during my two-month internship at Zhiliangtian Farm in Alxa, being a barista was, in reality, my day-to-day routine at the…
In May, I left my job, said a temporary goodbye to Beijing, and headed to the Zhi Liang Tian Ecological Farm in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, where I spent two months. I didn’t expect that during my first month at the farm, I would be drinking every single day. Two-thirds of…
Picture a plate of vegetables before you, not harvested by muddy-handed farmers out in the fields, but cultivated as a technological feat within a vertical farming tower built of metal and plastic. How would you react? In 2018, while in Berlin, I found myself utterly captivated by the vertical farming…
Power generation above the panels, crop cultivation below: a single plot of land yields two streams of income. “Agrivoltaics” claims to deliver multiple benefits—including clean electricity, efficient land use, agricultural modernisation, and rural development—and is frequently hailed as a win-win technological innovation that simultaneously addresses food, energy, and climate challenges.…
Over the past few years, media reports have frequently highlighted cases of street traders being fined for selling leeks, celery and other produce with pesticide residues exceeding permitted levels. Fines have ranged from as little as 5,000 to tens of thousands. High-end supermarkets and mid-to-upmarket online grocers, upon which both…
