Ten Years Growing Every Dish We Crave by Hand
Editor’s Note
I. In Search of “Rice”
When I cook, I use Chen Ying’s compost-grown rice as a base, blending it with other wholegrains, seeds or nuts. The result is naturally nourishing, with a rich texture and a flavour that is truly “aromatic, sweet and deeply satisfying.”
In moments like these, I feel profoundly grateful that Chen Ying grows rice for us. Each month, I arrange through the Chengdu Lifestyle Market for her to bring ten *jin* (5 kg) of rice from Meishan.
I first met Chen Ying several years ago.
Having worked in the food industry early in my career, I have always been wary of foods of unknown origin. The arrival of children naturally intensified my desire for clean, wholesome food. As the saying goes, “You are what you eat.” Given that the number of meals we consume in a lifetime is finite, food continually shapes us over time. As the primary person responsible for feeding my children, my priority is to nurture their health, so the immediate task was to find a trustworthy “rice supplier”.
Rice is so central to our diet that Fuchsia Dunlop dedicates a section to plain steamed rice in her new book, 君幸食. In that very chapter, she quotes the American anthropologist Sidney Mintz, who wrote that “rice is the ‘core’ of the Chinese diet, while dishes (or ‘accompaniments’) are merely the ‘fringe’.” I couldn’t agree more, recalling my mother’s advice: “For good health, eat your fill at every meal.”
In our quest for the right rice, my family and I visited several organic farms before we knew Chen Ying. We travelled from Moganshan to Xinjin, then to Chongzhou and Dujiangyan, but found none of them suitable:
The rice from several large organic farms around Chengdu averaged 25 yuan per jin, which stretched our budget. Moganshan’s rice was cheaper at 15 yuan a jin, but it was too far away. Sourcing it would violate our principle of “eating within a 100-kilometre radius” to support local ecological cycles and community mutual aid, while also needlessly increasing carbon emissions and generating more delivery and packaging waste.
So when I heard about a woman called Chen Ying growing rice in Meishan, I was thrilled. I promptly reached out to her, hoping to visit her place and see exactly how she cultivated it.
Since then, all the rice in our home has come from Chen Ying. Occasionally, she also includes some rice bran with the order for us to feed the poultry at our nature school, or for the children at the camp to use as compost after washing up.
Aside from the excellent price, the main reason I chose her rice was what I saw after visiting her farm. Around that time, a friend who runs a bookshop in Xi’an happened to send me a copy of *Gengshi Shenghuo* (*The Life of Farming and Eating*). I never expected that in my search for rice, I would end up at Chen Ying’s and witness a unique, self-sufficient Sichuan interpretation of farming and eating life. Along with my admiration, I felt a profound sense of relief: from now on, I’d never have to stress over rice again.
II. Chen Ying: Grow Whatever You Want to Eat
She truly is the spitting image of Yumi Hayakawa, author of *A Life of Farming and Eating*. In Shifo Township, Meishan, she lives a life “not governed by her own clock, but by the rhythms of the plants.” After nearly a decade of this farming-and-eating lifestyle, Chen Ying’s accomplishments can be summed up in a single phrase: “The only food I need to buy is salt.”
Over the years, watching Chen Ying work the land, one is constantly reminded of nature’s most wondrous gift: the ability to set a person free, allowing them to drift at ease and rediscover a childlike innocence.
At times, she’s scouring the countryside for cow horns to craft starter cultures, practising biodynamic farming on her farm in step with the phases of the moon;
Other times, she’s sowing cotton, hoping to weave it into quilts and coats once harvested;
Sometimes, inspired by the bread ovens at Le Mao’s, she builds her own and takes the freshly baked loaves to the market to sell;
Then again, she’ll invest in a home dehydrator, turning the farm’s delicate, hard-to-ship fruits into dried treats for easy storage and sharing with others;
……
On the farm, Chen Ying tackles every new project with the playful curiosity of a child, putting her hand to whatever catches her eye. During the quieter farming months, she travels with partners from charitable organisations to visit and learn from others, absorbing the best practices from each. The first ten years since she returned home to farm seem to have slipped by in the blink of an eye.
Yet, within that fleeting moment, she has already fulfilled the promise she made to herself in her youth: to grow every single thing she wished to eat with her own hands.
III. Turning Waste into Treasure: Rice-Duck Rice
Meishan is known as the “Granary of Tianfu”. For local farmers, growing rice the conventional way – relying on pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and herbicides – is standard practice. Chen Ying, however, set out to practise ecological agriculture, an approach that demands both meticulous care and exhausting labour. Her existing twenty-odd mu of land ought to have kept her occupied enough, yet she expanded the holding to forty mu. Her underlying motivation was, surprisingly, to create a buffer that would lessen the impact of the pesticides and fertilisers used by neighbouring villagers in their “standard operations” from drifting into her self-sufficient patch. The result is an extra annual rent bill, paid willingly to sustain a long-term project of ecological restoration.
Determined to grow high-quality rice without chemical fertilisers, pesticides, or herbicides, Chen Ying recruited an army of ducks for pest control and hired a dedicated worker to help her turn compost.
Composting has become the farm’s principal task alongside cultivation. Every withered branch and leaf from the osmanthus trees in the buffer zone, every dropping from the free-range poultry, every vine, leaf, root and peel from the vegetables and fruit, along with all manner of kitchen scraps, is gathered by her to be “turned into treasure”. Consequently, checking on the compost piles every day has become a firm part of her daily ritual.
Each spring, before raising seedlings, Chen Ying first shreds the rapeseed stalks and incorporates them into the soil to enrich it. Once the young plants have sprouted, she transplants them by hand. After the irrigation water is drained from the paddies, she lets the ducks loose in the rice fields to “work” for about half a year. During this time, she applies topdressing as needed to support the rice’s growth. When the grain is nearly ready for harvest and threshing into fresh rice, the duck army that has been on pest-control duty is retired and prepared as sweet-glazed duck. Her family’s annual homemade batch has, consequently, become something I eagerly look forward to each early autumn.
IV. Encountering “A Life of Farming and Eating”
I often joke that it isn’t Chen Ying who owns the Meet Family Farm, but rather the farm that owns Chen Ying.
For this reason, it felt perfectly natural to invite participants of the latest “I Want to Know My Food” book club to meet and exchange ideas with Chen Ying as we read *Farming and Eating Life*.
This meeting sparked reflection in a fellow book club member who attended that day. I’ve known her for years; she runs an art studio and has long dreamt of retiring to the countryside after fifty to live a simpler life. After visiting Chen Ying’s home, she realised she still had a long way to go in her preparations.
She saw the conditions that allowed Chen Ying to retire in her forties and explore a second act: starting work early, having children young, a husband employed in the city, and the family owning an old house and land in the countryside. Only when all these factors aligned could she step into her prime years and live out a carefree, idealised existence without any burdens.
Chen Ying is undoubtedly fortunate, but this fortune did not fall from the sky. It came because she never forgot the ideals in her heart, and made continuous, practical efforts towards them, until she finally reaped her “sweet reward.”
V. Everyone Can Have “Grain at Home, and Peace of Mind”
I’d slice slightly wilted carrots and stir-fry them with spicy chicken sent by Miss Jiang’s mother. The carrot slices, having soaked up the oil, tasted even better than the chicken. I’d take fresh, tender carrots, boil them whole alongside purple-skinned potatoes and purple cauliflower, then cube them into a “double-purple salad” brimming with anthocyanins.
Thinner carrots were diced and stir-fried with peas to make a three-colour minced meat dish. Right before serving, a dollop of homemade chilli sauce from a friend’s mother was added – it went wonderfully with rice.
Thicker carrots were cut into large chunks and cooked with corn and brown rice to make carrot rice. Paired with a quick blanch of leafy greens, it made for a delicious, nourishing dinner.
Naturally, the dining companions were a little unaccustomed at first to eating carrots for days on end. But gradually, through the simple act of sharing a meal, they began to feel the turning of the seasons and the quiet flow of connection between people. I feel honoured to have shared in the sweetness of Chen Ying’s farming and eating life, and to pass on this traceable reassurance and sweetness through the small dining table to more people, helping them understand what it truly means to have “a full pantry, a peaceful heart.”
Images: Unless otherwise stated, provided by the author
Editor: Xu Youyou