Held in Beijing from 18 to 20 August, the workshop recruits 25 media professionals to discuss food system transformation with scholars and practitioners, visit wholesale markets, eco-farms and waste-processing facilities, and offers post-workshop reporting grants alongside the establishment of a Pioneering Food and Agriculture Reporting Award.
A family tends ten mu of land, grows salad greens, makes ferments – with the support of Canada’s Fair Food Farms incubator, Sun Shan built Chi Garden from scratch and, through the joy of growing, left behind the helplessness and exhaustion of years in public-interest work.
The Wellcome Collection gallery in London, through more than 100 exhibits, traces milk’s century-long image-making from 19th-century “swill milk” to post-war “perfect food”, revealing how commercial interests, government rationing and nutritional promotion combined to make milk a staple of the modern table.
The State Administration for Market Regulation confirms, in its interpretation of the new Measures, that dried fish, dried vegetables and dried fruit can be sold as edible agricultural products if they have only undergone simple sun-drying. Earlier revision recommendations submitted by Foodthink and others together with farmer friends have been adopted.
Anthropology student Xiaocui interned three months at Letian Haiwan Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai. From planting tomatoes by hand to questioning why members rent plots, she saw the imagined pastoral and the real labour between city dwellers and the land.
Rural worker Huang Yajun has over a decade’s experience organising a green plum cooperative in Conghua, Guangdong. Against the near-century-old Silk Improvement Society of Fei Dasheng and the Women’s Sericulture School in Kaixiangong Village, he finds technology, capital, villagers’ sense of ownership and sales still the hardest problems.
Since its 1991 discovery in Beijing, Italian cocklebur has spread to Liaoning, Hebei and beyond; 8% coverage can cut yields by 60%. Yue Xiaoxiao at the Beijing Xuanwu Youth Science and Technology Museum leads schoolchildren in a distribution and damage survey, inviting farmers to fill in a questionnaire.
At Sister Yan Ping’s Hundred-Herb Garden in Guigang, Guangxi, the Wogans went from heavy on every tree to utterly bare. Three months of picking fruit, planting cassava and going to market turned ecological agriculture into blisters on our hands and flea bites on our legs.
Foodthink is now recruiting for Editor, Communications and Media Operations, and two Programme Officer positions for the Lianhe Programme and Climate Change, seeking new partners in sustainable food and agriculture at its Zhichun Road office in Beijing.
Back in Shen County, Shandong, she found no vegetables tasting like childhood. Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, she spent three months at Xiqing Farm, Beijing, learning from farmer Wang Xin – from identifying fully ripe strawberries to understanding ecological balance – now planning an ecological apple orchard at home.
