This episode of Food Talk features an impromptu conversation recorded at ‘Jishi’, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market’s physical space at Sanyuanqiao. We’ve welcomed back two old friends: Kang Li and Jin Peng. One is a Yi woman from Chuxiong, Yunnan, who funded her studies by selling mountain mushrooms and matsutake.…
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…
Foodthink Says Another 618 Shopping Festival is upon us. After the thrill of endless buying and unboxing, have you ever stopped to think about where all that plastic packaging we so casually sweep out the door actually ends up? “Eating well” is not just about nourishing ourselves; it is also…
In 2023, I arrived in Melbourne, the specialty coffee capital, on an Australian Working Holiday Visa to work and study. However, due to my lack of experience and the sheer number of young workers in the city, I found I couldn’t make ends meet on part-time café shifts alone. I…
I. Plastic as the Framework of Modern Life Could a modern person get by without plastic? When an American female author prepared to take on the challenge of avoiding plastic for a full day, she soon realised: modern life is virtually impossible without it. Within ten seconds of waking up,…
Foodthink Says 5 June is World Environment Day, and Foodthink continues to monitor the link between global meat consumption and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. Early in 2024, a joint investigation by the *Hong Kong Free Press* and the non-profit *Repórter Brasil* found that four trading companies in Hong Kong…
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 Since this spring, Shaanxi has experienced its most severe drought since 1961. Combined with extreme weather such as high temperatures, strong winds, and sandstorms, these compound disasters have seriously threatened agricultural production and rural livelihoods. In May, with the support of the Oxfam Hong Kong Beijing office, Foodthink…
I am someone who succumbed to pressure; I couldn’t keep playing this game of racing between skyscrapers. Now, I write my story in the hope that as a “failed player” still in flight, I can identify from those past “failures” the things that truly made me feel lonely and depressed,…
In the first decade of the 2000s, repeated food safety scandals prompted a growing number of Chinese consumers to seek out better farming practices and produce. Across the country, a new generation of farmers began pioneering organic agriculture. One such pioneer is this episode’s guest, Cao Xiaohong. In 2008, concerned…
