Ten Years of Farming and Living: Growing by Hand Every Food She Wants to Eat
Editor’s Note
I. Hunting for Rice
When I cook the rice, I base it on the grain Chen Ying grows with compost, then mix in other whole grains, seeds or nuts. The result is a pot that is nourishing and texturally rich in its own right, naturally fragrant, sweet and deeply satisfying.
At moments like these, I am so grateful that Chen Ying grows our rice. Every month I arrange, through the Chengdu Living Market, for her to bring 5 kg of rice up from Meishan.
I met Chen Ying several years ago.
Having worked in the food industry briefly when I started my career, I have always been wary of food whose provenance I cannot trace. After I had children, my need for clean, honest food grew all the more. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. The number of meals one eats in a lifetime is finite, and the food we eat shapes us over time. So as the primary person responsible for feeding my child, if I want to give her a healthy body, my first order of business is to find a rice supplier I can trust.
Rice matters so much that Fuchsia Dunlop devoted a passage to plain steamed rice in her new book Invitation to a Banquet. In that same passage, she quotes the American anthropologist Sidney Mintz: ‘Rice is the “core” of Chinese eating, while the dishes – or, as they are called, the accompaniments – are the “edges”.’ I wholeheartedly agree, because my mother always taught us: ‘To stay healthy, eat your fill at three proper meals a day.’
Before I found Chen Ying, our whole family had already visited several organic farms in search of the right rice. From Moganshan to Xinjin, Chongzhou and Dujiangyan, we checked them out one by one, and none of them worked:
At a few of the large organic farms around Chengdu, the average price of rice was 25 yuan per 500 g – well over our budget. The rice from Moganshan was 15 yuan per 500 g, but the distance was far too great. Not only did it violate the principle of local ecological circulation and community mutual aid – “try to eat food grown within 100 kilometres” – it also added needless carbon emissions and more courier and packaging waste.
Then I heard of a woman named Chen Ying who grows rice in Meishan, and I was thrilled. I immediately had the nerve to reach out to her, hoping to visit her farm and see exactly how she grows her rice.
Since then, all the rice in our home has come from Chen Ying. Sometimes she throws in a little rice bran with the order, for our natural school to feed the poultry, or for the camp children to use in the compost heap after washing up.
Beyond the lovely price, the main reason I chose Chen Ying’s rice was what I saw at her farm. Just around that time, a friend who runs a bookshop in Xi’an sent me a copy of Farming and Living. Little did I know that when my rice hunt led me to Chen Ying’s door, I would witness a self-sufficient, wholly original version of the farming-and-living life playing out in real time, right here in Sichuan. Between admiration and envy, I felt a great lightness settle over me – from now on, I could stop worrying about rice.
II. Chen Ying: Grow Everything You Want to Eat
She is, truly, the spitting image of Yumi Hayakawa, author of Farming and Living: living in Shifo Township in Meishan, not living to your own time, but centring your days on the time of plants. Almost ten years into her farming-and-living life, Chen Ying’s achievement to date can be summed up in a single sentence: ‘The only food that needs to be bought in is salt.’
Over these years, watching Chen Ying work the land, I am often struck by the most magical thing about nature: that it can set a person free and easy, returning them to a kind of guileless innocence.
One moment she is scouring the countryside for horn manure preparations, practising biodynamic agriculture on the farm according to the lunar phases;
the next, she plants cotton, hoping to make quilts and padded jackets from the harvest;
the next, she finds the bread oven at Lemao’s so fascinating that she builds one on the farm too, then carries the freshly baked loaves off to the market to sell;
the next, she buys a domestic food dehydrator and dries every awkward-to-ship fruit on the farm into dried fruit, easy to store and to share;
…
Chen Ying plays house at the farm like a child, having a go at everything herself. In the quieter spells between planting seasons, she travels with peers from the NGO to learn from others, borrowing ideas and skills. The first decade since she came home to the land seems to have passed in the blink of an eye.
And yet in just that one blink, she has fulfilled the wish she made to herself as a young woman: to grow by hand, one by one, everything she ever wanted to eat.
III. Turning Waste into Treasure: Rice-Duck Rice
Meishan sits in the “Granary of Tianfu”. Growing rice by conventional means – relying on pesticides, chemical fertilisers and herbicides – is standard practice for local farmers. But Chen Ying chose to pursue ecological agriculture, a path that is painstaking in intention as well as in effort. The twenty-odd mu she already had was more than enough to keep her busy, yet she expanded the farm to forty mu – and the reason was actually to reduce the interference that other villagers’ “conventional practice” was having on her little self-sufficient world: their pesticides and chemical fertilisers drifting over her patch. So every year she pays extra rent and carries on a long-term project of ecological restoration.
Without chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides, she still wants to grow good rice. Chen Ying enlisted an army of ducks for rice-duck pest control and hired a worker specifically to make compost alongside her.
Composting is the farm’s main work outside of growing crops. Fallen branches and leaves from the osmanthus grove in the buffer strip, droppings from free-range poultry, the vines, leaves, roots and peels of vegetables and fruit, and all manner of kitchen waste – she gathers every scrap and turns waste into treasure. And so, checking on the compost each day has become her daily ritual.
Every spring, before raising seedlings, Chen Ying chops up the rapeseed stems and returns them to the field to enrich the soil. Once the young rice plants emerge, they are transplanted by hand. After the paddies are flooded, the ducks are let in to “do their job” for the better part of half a year, during which top-dressing is applied as the rice grows. By the time the unhusked grain is ready to be harvested and milled into fresh rice, the army of ducks responsible for catching insects retires from duty – and is turned into sweet-skin duck. This once-a-year homemade sweet-skin duck has become a treat I long for in the early autumn.
IV. Meeting ‘Farming and Living’
I often joke, ‘It is not that Chen Ying owns Meet Farm – it is Meet Farm that owns Chen Ying.’
And so, when the latest ‘I Want to Know My Food’ reading group took on Farming and Living, I brought participants to meet Chen Ying in person. What better way to round off the book?
The visit set a fellow book club member thinking. She and I have known each other for years; she runs an art studio day in, day out, and often dreams of retiring to the countryside once she turns fifty. After seeing Chen Ying’s home, she felt that there was still a great deal of preparation for her to do.
She could see the conditions that allowed Chen Ying to ‘retire early’ in her forties and explore a second life: she had entered the workforce young, had her child young, her husband had a job in town, and the family owned an old homestead and land in the countryside. With every strand of fate woven together, she was finally free, in her most vital years, to ‘play house’ without a single worry.
Chen Ying is undoubtedly fortunate. But this fortune did not fall from the sky. It came because she never once forgot the dream in her heart and paid the price in steady, down-to-earth effort – earning at last her ‘sweet reward’.
V. Everyone Can ‘Have Grain at Home and Worry No More’
I chose slightly wilted carrots, sliced them and stir-fried them with the spicy chicken Miss Jiang’s mum had sent us; the carrot slices, soaked in oil, were better than the chicken. I chose the freshest, most tender carrots, boiled them whole with purple-skinned potatoes and purple cauliflower, then cut them into chunks and tossed them into a ‘Purple Purple Salad’ – a whole bowlful of anthocyanins.
I diced thinner carrots and stir-fried them with peas into three-colour minced meat, adding a spoonful of chilli sauce made by a friend’s mother just before plating – it goes beautifully with rice.
I chopped the thickest carrots into big chunks and cooked them with corn and brown rice into carrot rice; one quick blanch of greens alongside, and there was a delicious, wholesome dinner.
Of course, eating carrots day after day took some getting used to at first for my meal companions. But slowly, through the simple act of eating, they too began to feel the turning of the seasons and the flow of feeling between people. I feel privileged to share in the sweetness of Chen Ying’s farming-and-living life, and to pass this traceable, heartfelt sweetness on through the Little Canteen to more and more people, so that more may understand what it means to ‘have grain at home and worry no more’.
Images: unless otherwise noted, all supplied by the author
Editor: Xu Youyou