Leaving from Beijing Chaoyang Station, we took a little over an hour on the high-speed rail to Pingquan North Station in Chengde, Hebei Province. Yingying Ren, the matriarch of Lianxiang Farm, was already waiting for us outside the station. Yingying is petite, with her hair swept back in a neat,…
You may have heard of homemade pickles, kimchi or kombucha, which seem to have become the latest craze among young people. In truth, you might never have considered that fermented foods are actually a staple in our kitchens. Whether it is soy sauce, vinegar, wine, cheese, miso or fermented bean…
I. The mere mention of fermentation always conjures up visions of rich, deeply flavoured foods. Yet rather than a culinary craft, it is better understood as a gift from nature. Through generations of accumulated knowledge, humans have learned to gently adjust external factors like temperature, working in harmony with natural…
As noted in the first instalment of the *Woren Valley Food Philosophy* series, a single pot of soup for White Dew calls for ten ingredients, nine of which are homegrown. I champion “self-sufficiency” as the ideal for valley life. On paper, our self-sufficiency rate appears to sit at a lofty…
Before starting my internship at Letian Bay Farm, I often pictured the customers here as a bunch of dedicated environmentalists. Otherwise, how could one explain why city dwellers would make the trek out to the countryside? In an age when everyone is rushing towards urban centres, going against the current…
Early autumn finally brought Evil Man Valley its first entirely self-reliant harvest since the community began. The emphasis on “self-reliant” is deliberate: it means handling every detail personally, from transplanting the seedlings to cutting the crop, managing the entire process single-handedly. I moved into Evil Man Valley in June…
In Yunnan, the annual mushroom season invariably sparks a collective frenzy with a distinctly ‘poisonous’ edge (and yes, we mean the actual toxicity of wild mushrooms). In recent years, as these fungi have crossed provincial borders and captured the wider public’s attention, the market has been shaken up each year…
Departing Xizhimen and passing through Nankou, the high-speed train crosses the high peaks of the Yanshan Mountains before reaching the Huailai Basin. Though less than an hour from Beijing, the landscape is entirely different: wide, flat plains, sprawling cornfields and vineyards, dotted with the massive towers of wind turbines. The…
Before winding eastwards into Beijing’s urban centre, the Yongding River traces a series of U-shaped bends through the hills. The villages of Longjiazhuang and Shuiyuzui lie on opposite banks, linked by a single road bridge. From 29 July to 2 August, extreme rainfall across the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region caused the Yongding…
Is the shift towards warmer and wetter conditions in China’s northwestern region a benefit or a detriment to local agriculture? The instinctive reaction among many is that increased moisture is a positive development for the arid inland northwest—after all, access to water means more crops can be cultivated. Yet the…
