Since early June, a video titled “From a City Besieged by Waste to Not Enough Waste to Burn: China’s Speed Leaves the West Bewildered” has spread rapidly online. The notion of simply tossing unsightly rubbish into incinerators for a thorough burn, then harnessing the released energy for electricity, has left…
Epigraph As a generation born after the 1990s, we rode the waves of marketisation and commercialisation, experiencing the vibrant, dazzling world they ushered in. Unlike our parents’ generation, who were mostly born to farm and did nearly everything by hand, we outsourced the bulk of our daily clothing, necessities, and…
Foodthink Says The ongoing saga of rice “shortages” and soaring prices in Japanese supermarkets has stretched from last summer to this one. Despite repeated government interventions, prices refused to drop. Instead, the crisis intensified, earning the media moniker the “Reiwa Rice Turmoil”. Japanese consumers were up in arms, and farmers…
Recently, someone quipped that McDonald’s has transformed into an unfeeling ‘middle-aged’ entity, having traded its childlike wonder and youthful vigour for the drab routine of a canteen catering to wage labourers. Yet in truth, McDonald’s has never been short of such workers. I found myself genuinely taken aback, and suspect…
Foodthink Says “Stories about food are the best stories we can tell.” This is what Dan Saladino, a senior BBC correspondent, said in an interview with Foodthink at the Third International Congress on Agricultural Biodiversity this past May. Saladino specialises in food and agriculture journalism. Over the past decade, he…
Foodthink Says “Half the year we bake, the other half we drown.” Farmers across parts of Guangxi are weathering unprecedented natural disasters. It started with an once-in-sixty-years drought. From November last year to April this year, average rainfall across Guangxi fell nearly 70 per cent short of the long-term average,…
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…
