Building a Friendly Food System | Food Studies Society Course Recap

– Food Studies Society Notes –

The first course in the Food Studies Society Sustainable Food series, “Understanding Food,” has drawn to a close. This article is a write-up of the fourth session, delivered by instructor Qi Miao on 6 October, and includes three video clips from the live broadcast. Keep following Foodthink for updates on upcoming courses. For the full course content, please refer to the notes and links at the end of this article.

A Word Before We Begin

In the earlier sessions of our “Understanding Food” course, we have examined a range of problems brought about by the industrialised food system from multiple angles. For example, in the previous lesson, instructor Wanqing discussed the role of microorganisms in soil, how chemical fertilisers and pesticides degrade soil health, and the environmental and social issues arising from industrialised intensive farming. Click here to learn more: Soil, Animals, Food and the Environment (Part 1); Soil, Animals, Food and the Environment (Part 2). Having covered so many problems, this session turns to what can be done to address the challenges of the food system and build a more friendly and sustainable one. Through sharing various responses, experiments, explorations and discussions that people are already engaged in, we hope to offer some inspiration.

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Part One: High-Tech Agriculture

Video | Part One of the 6 October session, presenter: Qi Miao

When food-related issues are raised – hunger, farmers’ livelihoods, climate change, environmental pollution, and so on – a common answer is that injecting high technology can boost crop yields, reduce environmental pollution, and improve both farmers’ livelihoods and the environment. Is high-tech agriculture really a magic bullet that can solve every problem? Is it truly the answer to improving the environmental and social challenges tied to food?

Today, through two case studies, we will explore how to think about the impact of technology on us, and whether high-tech agriculture can genuinely address the problems of the existing food system.

Vertical Farming / Vertical Farms / Plant Factories

The design philosophy behind vertical farms is to achieve fully controlled production, using artificial indoor lighting in place of natural light. Image source | aerofarms

As the image shows, this is a high-tech vertical farming facility. In simple terms, vertical farming takes the traditional production method – spread out horizontally across large areas of land – and moves it indoors, growing crops vertically under artificial lighting in place of sunlight.

Proponents of vertical farming argue that this approach offers many advantages: in particular, the growing environment is entirely under human control, free from the constraints of climate and natural conditions. Its underlying logic and goals are a continuation of industrialised agriculture: monoculture and high yields.

A vertical farm in Liangxiang, Beijing. Vertical farming currently grows a relatively limited range of crops, predominantly leafy greens. Photograph | Foodthink

Japan’s largest vertical farm, Spread, grows four varieties of lettuce and produces over 20,000 heads per day. The Green Sense farm outside central Chicago covers 2,800 square metres and is one of the world’s largest LED-lit vertical farms, with an annual output of up to 1.5 million tonnes.

Container-based vegetable growing once appeared in central Beijing – a form of vertical farming. Image source | technode

Vertical farming appears to offer many benefits, but is it truly the new hope for agriculture’s future, as its promoters claim, capable of resolving the sector’s many problems? Does it have its own limitations? The answer is yes.

First, the range of crops is limited. No method has yet been found for growing major grain crops vertically, so vertical farming currently focuses mainly on vegetables. Second, the costs are high: urban land is expensive, and the construction costs for the farms and equipment are also substantial – a high-quality vertical farm requires an investment of hundreds of millions of US dollars.

In addition, vertical farming is marketed as low-energy, but measurements by some scientists show that energy consumption is in fact very high. Unlike traditional agriculture, which relies on sunlight, vertical farming uses electricity to provide light, resulting in enormous power usage. Electricity typically accounts for around 70 per cent of a vertical farm’s total operating costs. Researchers at the Kansas Land Institute in the United States have estimated that if vertical farming were to replace all of the country’s current wheat production, the electricity required for lighting alone would be eight times the annual output of all US power stations. Furthermore, according to Luis Albright, director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture programme at Cornell University in the United States, current research indicates that large-scale vertical growing generates a carbon footprint from electricity consumption that is more than ten times that of traditional agriculture. If that is the case, energy consumption is a major problem for vertical farming.

Vertical farming is a technology- and capital-intensive industry. From the outset, it is a game of capital – an agricultural model accessible only to wealthy investors. In 2017, tech companies such as Amazon and Google began investing in vertical farming. Plenty, a San Francisco-based vertical farming company, announced its intention to enter the Chinese market after raising $200 million, with plans to build 300 indoor vertical farms in China. Neil Mattson, a botany professor at Cornell University and a long-time researcher in indoor agriculture, argues that investing that $200 million in high-efficiency solar greenhouses would be far more cost-effective, both environmentally and financially, than building such vertical farms.

Whether vertical farming is ultimately a gimmick remains to be seen, but it is clear that this model of agriculture is changing the way we source our food. This form of high-tech farming no longer requires sunlight, land, or the labour of farmers – what it seems to need is only technicians and a small number of workers. In doing so, the connection between us and the natural world appears to be slowly dissolving.

Molecular Agriculture

Meat, grown in a petri dish rather than taken from an animal. Image source | lab-grown-meat

Instructor Wanqing has shared discussions she witnessed at the Quality Food Conference in the United States, where the term “clean meat” – meat synthesised using cell-culture technology – was a topic of conversation. Clean meat is produced by taking cells from an animal and then growing them in a laboratory, nourished with animal serum, until they form edible meat. These meats contain no bones or organs and are regarded as meat without slaughter.

Illustration of molecular agriculture. Image source | DailyMail

In traditional livestock farming, a single cow requires vast amounts of energy across numerous stages – from rearing and transport to slaughter and butchery. Livestock production also generates greenhouse gas emissions and pollutes waterways with animal waste (see Lesson Three: Soil, Animals, Food and the Environment). In Western countries, most offal is discarded, creating waste. Advocates of molecular agriculture argue that lab-grown meat shortens the distance between production and the consumer and eliminates waste.

At the same time, we must ask another question: can lab-grown meat truly resolve the existing problems of livestock farming, or does it merely create another revenue stream?

Setting aside the safety of lab-grown meat and the potential impacts on our health or the environment that future production systems may have – neither of which is yet known – “clean meat” is, like vertical farming, a technology- and capital-intensive model from the start. Billionaires such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic, have all moved into the space. Tyson, the world’s largest meat company, and Cargill, one of the largest food companies, are also eager to enter. In this respect, the underlying structure of the future meat industry remains unchanged: it is still controlled by large corporations, and the emergence of lab-grown meat simply gives those big companies another hook to attract customers and another source of revenue.

The birth of lab-grown meat appears to address the problems brought about by industrialised farming, yet the underlying logic of the two shares some similarities – for instance, both treat meat as a mere source of food, overlooking the multifunctional role that livestock farming plays within the agricultural system.

Reflection

Will our food in the future still come from agriculture? What exactly is agriculture? When we think of agriculture today, we feel it is intimately connected to sunlight, soil, water, and the local environment. Industrialised agriculture, though already half agriculture and half factory production, still relies on the sun, the land, and the environment. Whether future agriculture takes the form of molecular agriculture or vertical farming, it is detached from sunlight, soil, and the local environment, shifting towards fully controlled conditions. How will we define agriculture going forward? Where will our future food come from – from agricultural cultivation, or from a laboratory or factory?

Does the emergence of high-tech agriculture truly solve existing problems, as its proponents promise? Might these high-tech production methods bring about other consequences we have not foreseen? This kind of critique or exploration is not to say we do not need technology. Technology is, of course, important. The issue is that we should not overemphasise technology as a solution to individual problems while overlooking the fact that each problem is actually part of a larger systemic issue, requiring coordinated resolution across all stages.

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Part Two: What Can Consumers Do?

Video | Part One of the 6 October session, presenter: Qi Miao

The food system is a large system with various stages – production, distribution, consumption, and so on. Only when all parts change in coordination can our food system possibly change. For example, in production, how can we better encourage more smallholder farmers to adopt sustainable farming methods; in distribution, how can we provide market access for smallholder farmers; and as consumers, we may also need to make certain efforts.

Establishing a Suitable Dietary Structure and Habits

Research has shown that our physical health is closely linked to the food we consume.

The most fundamental step we need to take is to establish a dietary structure and habits that suit us.

Superfoods and dietary trends are constantly changing, leaving people unsure of what to follow.

Establishing a suitable dietary structure and habits sounds simple but is difficult to put into practice, because dietary trends come wave after wave and theories follow one after another. Take the fruit-and-vegetable-juice fasting and detox diet shown in the image, or various popular superfoods such as avocado and kale. Every so often a new trend emerges – a claim about healthy eating that, after a while, is disproven, causing further confusion. Whose advice should we listen to? What is right for us? Everyone follows the crowd, there is no fixed answer, and everyone’s physical constitution is different. Some people eat high-calorie foods every day and never develop diabetes or obesity; others are allergic to grains or lactose, while yet others can eat anything without any issues – so the confusion only deepens.

We are all in Foodthink’s co-learning group. The only solution to this kind of confusion is probably to keep learning – to study and reflect before making decisions, rather than blindly following whatever others say.

In Defense of Food and Its Author, Michael Pollan

Most importantly, we need to develop a broader understanding of food issues. When thinking about these issues, we should not just fixate on food itself or compare which dietary method is better, but ask: why do these dietary trends exist in the first place? This is also the question the author, Michael Pollan, keeps asking in In Defense of Food: why did we start caring about food? A question that for thousands of years seemed perfectly straightforward – why has it become so complex? The fundamental issue is not which nutrient is good or which diet is superior; the fundamental issue is why questions about nutrients and diets arise at all. Perhaps once we have a broader understanding of food, the question of which diet to follow will resolve itself. These diets and dietary guidelines are simply commercial opportunities created by exploiting our anxiety and desire for good health.

As Michael Pollan puts it in the book, the basic principles we should follow are really just a few: “Eat what your grandmother ate – or, more simply, eat more vegetables, less meat, and choose good meat.”

Consume Local Food, Support Smallholder Farming

Some people might ask: as long as I know my food is safe and healthy, why should I care whether it comes from smallholder farmers, or whether it is local or imported? Similar questions are actually debated. Food trade has existed since ancient times – as far back as the Silk Road thousands of years ago, we already had import and export of food, so we have always been eating imported foods. Others find themselves torn between supporting distant organic smallholder farmers versus local large-scale farms. But what is beyond doubt is that if we support local ecological farmers, we are supporting the water we drink, the air we breathe, the local political and ecological environment, and our own health. Local consumption also supports the local economy. If we shop at multinational supermarket chains, the money ends up in those corporations’ pockets and does not flow back to the local community, nor does it contribute to the community’s sustainable development. When we choose to support smallholder farmers, we are not just supporting agricultural development; we are also strengthening bonds within the community, supporting rich and diverse rural communities, and indirectly supporting the preservation of rural culture and traditions. Compared with large-scale industrialised agriculture, smallholder farming is more diverse, and smallholder farmers make significant contributions to seed diversity and biodiversity.

Farmers’ Markets

The Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market is held in different corners of the city every weekend, where local ecological smallholder farmers can bring fresh produce to interact with urban consumers. Image source | Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market

As consumers, one of the most direct ways we can support local smallholder farmers is through our purchasing choices. How should we buy in a way that supports local food or ecological smallholder farmers? We can choose to support local fair trade market channels, such as farmers’ markets.

A farmers’ market is a platform for smallholder farmers to sell directly. Compared with regular markets, what sets a farmers’ market apart is its encouragement of democratic participation and management by consumers, producers, and other stakeholders, with an emphasis on transparency in the process. For example, in areas such as pricing and quality control, both producers and consumers can take part. At a farmers’ market, both consumers and producers have a voice.

Community Supported Agriculture

Another way to support local ecological smallholder farmers is to join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm and become a member of a local CSA operation. In the 1970s, the CSA model first emerged in Japan through the “teikei” system – essentially a way for consumers to pool their resources and buy directly from farmers. The model then spread to Europe and North America, where it gradually took root and developed. By 2007, statistics from the US Department of Agriculture showed that there were over 12,500 CSA farms in the United States.

As a representative of CSA in our country, Little Donkey Urban Farm has just celebrated its tenth anniversary. Image source | Little Donkey Urban Farm

China also has CSA farms. As early as 2006, Professor He Huili from China Agricultural University took up a post as deputy county magistrate in Lankao, Henan Province. She promoted a “rice-purchase land-lease model,” connecting consumers who wanted to buy ecological rice with local production cooperatives to help local farmers sell their harvest – this can be seen as an early prototype of CSA in China. In 2008, the establishment of Little Donkey Urban Farm marked a milestone in the development of CSA in China, and the farm has just celebrated its tenth anniversary.

How does CSA work? As the diagram below shows, first, consumers prepay the farm at the start of the production cycle for their full-year share. Farmers use this prepayment to purchase seeds and other production materials they need. Through this process, consumers know who provides their food and how that food is produced. The farmer provides food for the consumer over the course of the year, typically delivering it to the consumer’s home. The consumer’s prepayment provides the producer with vital cash flow and financial security.

A major benefit of CSA is that it strengthens the direct connection between consumers and producers. With no middlemen involved, prices become fairer for both producers and consumers. In addition, the prepayment system provides producers with important financial security. Such a close relationship and channel of communication is established between producers and consumers that if a producer suffers crop losses due to bad weather, consumers are very willing to help share the risk. The CSA model therefore provides substantial support for smallholder farming, and this model is gradually maturing and growing stronger.

A New York Times article on the commercial appropriation of CSA language. Image source | New York Times

However, much like the development of the organic food movement, once CSA became a proven model, commercial capital saw a profit opportunity and began co-opting CSA language. The moment CSA is used as a marketing tool, the result drifts further and further from the original standards and intentions. In 2016, a New York Times article examined how capital-backed so-called CSA companies act as intermediaries, aggregating products from various sources to offer consumers a wider selection, but in doing so completely transforming the relationship between consumers and production. An individual farmer simply has no way to compete with these companies in terms of product variety.

Although these companies emphasise in their marketing that they support smallholder farmers, this is nothing more than a promotional strategy, because they themselves are not smallholder farmers. Consumers exposed to this marketing are easily misled, as they cannot tell the difference between such corporate CSA operations and CSA farms actually run by smallholder farmers. Suffering the impact of imitation CSA operations, genuine CSA farms in the United States have been hit hard in recent years, with significant declines in both membership numbers and revenue. Some have been forced to go bankrupt and close their doors.

The fact that commercial models exploit CSA language in their marketing is also because, in many regions, CSA has no legally binding definition – in other words, anyone can use the term. In California, the United States, the definition of CSA was written into legislation, so when farmers feel their CSA model is being infringed upon, they can use the law to protect themselves. Turning to the domestic situation, the commercial dilution of CSA here is also very evident. Protecting smallholder farmers’ CSA models through legislation is a worthwhile approach worth considering.

Consumer Cooperative

A consumer cooperative in California, US. Photograph | Qi Miao

Consumer cooperatives have gradually emerged and developed in China in recent years. What is a consumer cooperative? In a consumer cooperative, consumers are not merely consumers but also owners of the cooperative. Consumers jointly participate in the cooperative’s decision-making and development. For example, what the cooperative needs, what to sell, even which products to boycott and how to set prices – all of these are decided collectively by consumers. As with the two approaches discussed earlier, consumer cooperatives also place great emphasis on supporting local ecological smallholder farmers and on community building. (Foodthink’s article on consumer cooperatives | Remarkable Chengdu Mums: A Cooperative Path from Self-Help to Mutual Aid)

A local smallholder farmer section inside a consumer cooperative in California, US. Photograph | Qi Miao

This photo is of the consumer cooperative in my neighbourhood. The area marked “local” is a dedicated section the cooperative has set up to sell vegetables produced by local smallholder farmers. They also label the product information for different items.

Buying only what you need and reducing packaging are principles championed by many US consumer cooperatives. Photograph | Qi Miao

This image shows the bulk section of the cooperative, where consumers can buy soy sauce, honey, olive oil, as well as dry goods, snacks, and even shampoo and body wash. This approach reduces packaging use.

Compared with farmers’ markets and CSA, consumer cooperatives place greater emphasis on organisational and decision-making structures, as well as consumer participation.

Organisational structure of the Taiwan Housewives’ Alliance Consumer Cooperative. Image source | Taiwan Housewives’ Alliance Consumer Cooperative

Taking the member organisational structure of the Taiwan Housewives’ Alliance Living Consumer Cooperative as an example, we can see the following: the Members’ General Assembly is the highest authority, under which a Board of Directors is established with full authority to exercise power on behalf of the members. The Board is divided into different working groups to manage various affairs. For instance, an operations group, and an education group responsible for consumer education and organising activities. Under the Members’ General Assembly there is also a Supervisory Board, which is responsible for the cooperative’s day-to-day operations and financial oversight.

Such an organisational framework not only provides consumers with reassuring food, but also creates a space for democratic participation. This space can enhance consumers’ civic awareness and give them an opportunity to grow. Consumer cooperatives also pay close attention to community building, so they provide not only products but also community services, such as childcare, cooking workshops, community waste recycling, kitchen waste composting, and so on. Members can organise all kinds of community activities among themselves.

Consumer cooperatives around the world all follow a set of principles. In brief, they are:

• Voluntary membership – you are free to join or to leave;
• Democratic management;
• One member, one vote – no matter how many shares you hold in the cooperative, each person casts only one vote.

All cooperatives use these principles to govern their operations. However, each cooperative manages its internal affairs differently. For example, to reduce operating costs, some require consumers to contribute labour (such as New York’s Park Slope cooperative); some serve members only (such as the Taiwan Housewives’ Alliance); and others are open to non-members but return profits to members exclusively.

Consumer cooperatives in China are still in their early stages of development and remain small in scale. Compared with cooperatives in Western and East Asian countries, a defining feature here is urban-rural mutual aid. Domestic consumer cooperatives are very focused on supporting smallholder farmers in impoverished areas – for instance, they may first help struggling farmers shift to better growing methods, and then improve smallholder livelihoods through sustained purchasing. I think this is one of the most important characteristics of our domestic cooperatives.

Consumer cooperatives hold regular urban-rural interaction events. The image shows consumers and producers working the land together. Image source | RunTu BangBang Urban-Rural Mutual Aid Consumer Cooperative

This photo is from an event organised by the RunTu BangBang Urban-Rural Mutual Aid Consumer Cooperative in Yunnan Province. They took consumers to a producer’s home, where consumers and producers worked together to tend the pigs. Along the way, consumers picked up some practical knowledge – for example, how to tell a free-range pig apart. This is the process of producers and consumers sharing knowledge and growing together. It is also a way of bringing consumers and producers into solidarity and building community.

We have introduced three representative approaches to buying local ecological smallholder produce: farmers’ markets, CSA, and consumer cooperatives. But market models are far more varied. For example, some rural development organisations run urban-rural mutual aid shops that sell farm produce from project sites, helping local farmers increase their income. These shops are also a route through which consumers can access quality produce.

How exactly do these models differ from mainstream markets? Why should we bypass the conventional market channels and buy through these means instead? First, unlike mainstream markets, these project-based models, although they operate using market mechanisms, aim to serve the public good – for example, promoting the development of ecological agriculture, building trust between consumers and producers, and improving smallholder livelihoods. These organisations do not pursue profit maximisation; instead, they seek food justice and harmonious development within the community.

Because these models differ so fundamentally from mainstream markets, we must be especially vigilant about commercial capital’s erosion and co-optation of them. Farmers’ markets, CSA, and consumer cooperatives all focus on helping smallholder farmers improve their livelihoods, protecting the environment, alleviating food safety concerns, and building community. When commercial capital exploits these approaches in marketing, it is simply selling a story; the underlying focus remains profit maximisation. That is the fundamental distinction between the two.

Reflections

We have talked a great deal about how consumers can participate in building a sustainable food system through their purchasing choices. Individual consumer choice is important and can have a very positive effect on improving the food system. But we also need to reflect on and discuss whether consumer participation alone has limitations when it comes to addressing the problems in our food system.

We have been placing a great deal of emphasis on consumer responsibility. In doing so, we have shifted the responsibility for and the problems of food safety onto consumers, while overlooking the responsibilities, the role, and the changes that governments and large corporations ought to take on. We should not think about change only from the perspective of the individual consumer. We need to pay greater attention to what changes large corporations should make and what policy adjustments governments should undertake.

We must also recognise that consumer cooperatives, farmers’ markets, and CSA farms are all still using market mechanisms to address existing problems, and so these approaches will inevitably be subject to the forces of the market.

Consumer behaviour alone is unlikely to shift a structural problem. Although we want to use our purchasing choices to improve farmers’ lives, a major challenge in rural areas right now is the shortage and outmigration of labour. Using consumption to draw farmers back to the countryside and reverse rural economic decline is, in practice, very difficult. Of course, we should support individuals in making the right choices, but we must also acknowledge that many structural problems are beyond what individual action alone can change. We need to encourage more collective engagement in driving change – across policy, culture, and the economy – in order to create a greater impact.

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Part Three: Other Actions to Improve the Food System

Video | Part Three of the 6 October lecture. Lead speaker: Qi Miao

Our relationship with food is not merely one of purchase. Food is not just a commodity sitting in a shop window. Our connection to food is multifaceted. We can grow our own food, forage in cities or in the hills, and even find food in the bins (see the Foodthink article: Foraging in the Bins in Canada | Frontier Food & Farming). It is only when we truly recognise the many different relationships that surround food that we can think more creatively about ways to address the problems in our current food system.

Urban Agriculture

Community garden in Detroit

Many countries are now embracing the community garden movement. Take the United States as an example: community gardens have become an important source of vegetables for many low-income residents. Detroit is a long-established heavy-industry city. After it declared bankruptcy in 2013, its population plummeted from two million in the 1950s to around 700,000 today. 84 per cent of the population is African American. The middle class has left the city, large numbers of properties have been abandoned, a third of the city’s land has become vacant, and many municipal services have been shut down. Residents are especially short of fresh vegetables, and 70 per cent of the population is overweight or obese. In these circumstances, local NGOs and residents launched an urban agriculture movement. They set up community gardens in corners across the city, hoping that through this approach Detroit residents could eat locally grown vegetables and fruit and reclaim their food sovereignty.

There are over 1,600 community gardens scattered across Detroit. Image source | Keep Growing Detroit

The green dots on the map mark community gardens located in every corner of Detroit – there are roughly 1,600 of them, so the impact has been significant. But we cannot be overly optimistic in saying that community gardens have solved every problem. Gardens alone cannot meet all of a community’s food needs. What matters is that, in the process of participating in community gardens, people have rebuilt close connections between themselves and their food, between themselves and nature, and among one another. This process of transforming how people think and relate to the world around them is profoundly important.

Many people say Detroit is a special case, because not every city has that much open space. Cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Beijing are places where land is extremely expensive – how could you possibly use large plots to grow vegetables? But we can be highly creative and put urban agriculture into practice in all sorts of places, such as rooftops and balconies.

Community garden in Hong Kong  Photograph | Qi Miao

This photo shows a community garden in Hong Kong. In the second image you can see a block of apartment buildings right next to it. At the time, the community garden was in a dispute with a property development company that wanted to build on the land, while local residents were trying hard to save their garden.

Rooftop community garden in Japan  Photograph | Qi Miao

This is a photo of a community garden in Japan. They built a large garden on the rooftop, complete with a pond, and grew rice using the rice-duck farming method. They then brewed rice wine from the harvest. Even where space is tight, if you have the idea, there will always be a way to get involved.

Residents in a Zhuhai community, by building a community garden together, have not only been able to enjoy fresh vegetables but also strengthened the bonds between people.

Foodthink once published an article titled “The Guerrilla Vegetable-Growing Squad on Lovers’ Road, Zhuhai.” It is a wonderfully entertaining piece about the neighbours along Lovers’ Road in Zhuhai and how they keep tirelessly hunting for places to grow vegetables. In the process of building their community garden together, they reactivated their neighbourly bonds. Beyond growing vegetables, they share all sorts of practical knowledge and organise a range of community activities. I have always believed that the most important thing in urban agriculture is not the output, the yield, or how many people it feeds, but the people’s participation – how, in the process, we sustain the relationships between people, between people and their society and community, and between people and nature. So I encourage everyone to try growing vegetables on their own balcony or in whatever space they can find. You will discover that the moment you put your hands in the soil, you form a very different connection with that place and its environment. That is my own experience, too.

Food Sharing

Besides community gardens, people have made other kinds of attempts, such as food sharing. When we talk about food sharing, we cannot overlook the issue of food waste.

Image source | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), one-third of all food produced each year for human consumption is wasted. In developed countries, 40 per cent of the waste occurs at the retail and consumer level; in developing countries, 40 per cent is lost in the post-harvest and processing stages. Much of the waste at the retail level happens because food is discarded for not meeting appearance standards. Food waste is also a very serious problem in China. Data shows that food wasted on dining tables in China amounts to 200 billion yuan per year, and the quantity of food thrown away is equivalent to the annual food ration of over 200 million people. The situation is truly alarming. Many people have taken action, trying different approaches to reduce waste or rescue food that would otherwise be discarded.

Sharing Fridge

Food-sharing fridges abroad

In Europe there is a network platform called Food Sharing, which places sharing fridges in different residential neighbourhoods. If you have surplus food at home – say you are suddenly going on a business trip, or after a gathering, or a community shop has food that does not look its best but is perfectly safe to eat – you can put it in the fridge. They have some basic rules in place to ensure food safety. People in need are free to take whatever they require, which helps prevent food from being thrown away or wasted. Shanghai also has a “Sharing Fridge” project.

Food Bank

In 2014, Shanghai Oasis Charity launched the first food bank project in China. Photograph | Foodthink Jun 

Food banks first appeared in the United States, accepting food donations from individuals, businesses, and various institutions to provide meal assistance to low-income people. Today, roughly one in seven Americans relies on the support of food banks.

These food-sharing initiatives have also started to appear in China, but they do not seem to be progressing smoothly. There are many reasons for this – some at the policy level, and others stemming from differences in our dietary habits.

I am sharing these foreign case studies in the hope of offering some inspiration, rather than encouraging blind imitation. China’s environment, policies, and regulations are completely different from those in the West. By drawing on others’ actions, we can find approaches that suit our own context.

Dumpster Diving

In the West, the practice of searching for food discarded by supermarkets in the bins is also known as dumpster diving.

Rescuing our food from the bins is a trend that has become quite popular in the West. Why does this behaviour exist? In Western contexts, many food items are discarded by retailers because they do not look appealing enough or have passed their best-before date. They are thrown into the huge bins behind supermarkets, most still in intact packaging and uncontaminated. Some of them are actually of quite good quality – especially food thrown out by organic shops – so some people go to these bins to forage. (On foraging in bins, see the Foodthink article: Foraging in the Bins in Canada | Frontier Food & Farming)

Eating food you find in the bins does not sound very glamorous. I once heard a little story: a girl studying in Denmark went dumpster diving with friends and found a lot of fresh vegetables and fruit. She was so excited that she called her parents to tell them she had found a great deal of fresh food in the bins. Her mother was very upset, feeling that her daughter was enduring such hardship, and sent her a large sum of money. This story shows just how much prejudice people have about this kind of food.

In fact, many people dumpster dive deliberately. On one hand, they hope to reduce their food costs through foraging in the bins; more importantly, they want to express a stance of resistance against an unjust and unreasonable food distribution system. These intentional practitioners are objecting to the existing unfair food system – food that has expired or can no longer be sold could clearly help people in need, yet it is simply thrown away.

It is worth noting that dumpster diving is popular in the West because food access in Western countries relies heavily on the supermarket system. Many food items come in packaging, so even after being thrown in the bins, they are not easily contaminated. Our country’s situation is quite different. First, we do not have bins that large; second, our sources of food are relatively diverse – in addition to supermarkets, there are farmers’ markets, neighbourhood vegetable shops, and so on.

Image source | Food Not Bombs

Dumpster diving is not merely an individual act, a trend, or a way of expressing a personal attitude. ‘Food Not Bombs’ is a global autonomous organisation that redistributes food obtained through dumpster diving and other “illegal” actions to homeless people and low-income individuals in need. They also organise rallies on various political issues, such as anti-war demonstrations and protests against the WTO. Dumpster diving also reflects their radical political stance and resistance to the capitalist system.

Urban Foraging

Image source | CivilEats

Compared with the more radical act of foraging in bins, urban foraging seems much more gentle – it simply means gathering food in the corners of the city. The reason I want to share the topic of urban foraging is also because of a discovery I made recently: in the small town where I live, virtually every household grows fruit trees – lemons, apples, persimmons, figs, pomegranates – as well as all sorts of herbs like mint. Rosemary is a commonly used spice in Western cuisine, and this town also uses rosemary bushes for urban landscaping, so they can be seen on every street corner. But I noticed that very few people go to pick the fruit when the trees are ripe, while many people buy fruit and various herbs like rosemary at the supermarket.

Rosemary used for community landscaping and packaged organic rosemary from the supermarket.

The photo on the left shows a very large rosemary bush; the one on the right is packaged organic rosemary from the supermarket. I have thought for a long time about why people do not simply pick it from outside but instead go to the supermarket to buy rosemary that is not exactly cheap. I think one very important reason is that people have become too accustomed to the industrialised food system, too used to the purchasing relationship we have with food, and assume that all our food comes from buying. So when we see wild rosemary, for people it is not food – it is merely an ornamental plant. Only rosemary that is packaged and labelled feels like food, safe to eat, while what is gathered from the wild feels risky.

Later, a group of retired elderly people appeared in our small town. They organised volunteers to pick fruit that residents had more than they could eat or no longer needed, and deliver it to the food bank. This is a relatively organised form of urban foraging.

An example of a fruit tree sharing map abroad

Some people have created fruit tree sharing maps. When you find a fruit tree of any variety anywhere, you can add a marker on the map, so that everyone can see where a public fruit tree is and go pick fruit from it.

Picking fruit in someone else’s yard is a very basic stage of urban foraging – it carries no risk at all. There is a more advanced form of urban foraging that requires a wealth of knowledge to know which plants can be picked. Or you need to be very familiar with the urban environment, knowing which areas are uncontaminated and safe to forage in, so a rich knowledge base is essential. Urban foraging has become a trend partly because it can save money – some wild mushrooms, for example, are very expensive; and also because it supplements our diet. Normally we might only eat a few types of vegetables, but wild greens are incredibly diverse. Take purslane, for instance, which is common and rich in plant-based omega-3 fatty acids.

Many people who practice urban foraging hope to change the purely transactional purchasing relationship with food through foraging. They do not want to rely on supermarkets but instead use their own knowledge to obtain food. They hope to build a relationship with nature and source their own food – it is also a way of resisting the industrialised food system.

For example, when a friend who is well-versed in urban foraging takes me out foraging, they will point at various plants and say this one can help improve your sleep, that flower can be steeped as a tea, this leaf can be added to a salad. You feel like you are starting to converse with food. The spaces you walk through become wonderful – the whole city no longer feels like a world of reinforced concrete, but rather a rich ecological system, deepening your gratitude and attachment to nature. This is why I want to share urban foraging, such a niche way of living.

Reflections

As we said at the beginning, there is no straightforward, standard answer to how we build a kind and friendly food system. Technology certainly needs to develop, but when people try to solve one problem and in the process create an entire new set of problems, do we not need to reflect on whether this mode of development is sustainable? As consumers, we can participate in improving our food system through our purchasing choices, but at the same time we must be wary of how commercial capital erodes and exploits ecological smallholder farmer models. We also need to recognise the limitations of our consumption behaviour and seek more diverse ways to participate in the rebuilding of our food system. Through building up these diverse approaches, we can change our relationship with food and gradually make our food system kinder and better. Click “Read the Original” to complete the post-class assignment.

Click “Read the Original” to complete the post-class assignment

About Qi Miao

Master’s in Community Development from the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on sustainable food systems and the development of various alternative food market models in China, particularly the operation and development of consumer cooperatives domestically. She previously served as a Farm to School project assistant at the California Family Farm Community Alliance (CAFF), working on connecting family farms with local schools and hospitals.

During her graduate studies, she served as a teaching assistant for several food-systems–related courses, conducted fieldwork and interviews at multiple consumer cooperatives in California, and participated in and organised several training programmes on consumer cooperatives. She is also a writer on sustainable food systems, with articles published on media platforms such as Foodthink and The Paper.

Course Oversight: Chang Tianle

Course Coordinator: Ma Xiaochao

Layout: Niu Niu

Course Recap

Sessions

Topics

Instructor

Lesson One Getting to Know Food (Part 1)

Qi Miao

Hao Keming Getting to Know Food (Part 2)

Qi Miao Getting to Know Food (Part 3)

Qi Miao

Lesson Two Food Labels (Part 1)

Qi Miao Food Labels (Part 2)

Qi Miao

Lesson Three Soil, Animals, Food and the Environment (Part 1)

Zhou Wanqing Soil, Animals, Food and the Environment (Part 2)

Zhou Wanqing

*All course content can be studied at any time through the “Food Studies Society” section on the Foodthink official WeChat account.

Agriculture

– About Food Studies Society Courses –

Whether it is the old adage that food is the first necessity of life or the everyday greeting ‘Have you eaten?’, food’s place in our lives and culture is beyond question. Yet when we take notice of the growing number of food-safety issues, farmers struggling with unsold produce, environmental pollution scandals, and illness from what we eat, we realise that our understanding of “what to eat” and “how to eat” is so lacking that it is genuinely difficult to make choices with any peace of mind.

So, Foodthink’s co-learning community, the Food Studies Society, has decided to launch a series of courses to fill in this essential yet never-taught lesson with everyone – food.

Each course is divided into three to six sessions, available both online and in person. Ordinary consumers can use these courses to learn what good food is, how to avoid poor-quality food, how to make the right choices, and to reflect on their own consumption habits – becoming consumers who are responsible not only for their own health and wallet but also for the environment and society. Those working in agriculture and the food sector can also deepen their understanding of sustainable food systems, paying attention in practice to environmental, social, economic, and cultural dimensions.

Beyond sharing knowledge and ideas, we will also progressively offer courses and workshops with practical value, helping everyone carry out their work more effectively, take action, and build a sustainable food system and community together.

Course Registration

We hope this is a community for co-learning, so we welcome everyone to participate in and study as many courses as possible in a systematic way, and to exchange ideas with one another along the way, growing together.

There are two ways to study the Food Studies Society’s sustainable food course series systematically:

1. Register for courses on this page: http://lxi.me/jkfmg

Once you have registered successfully, we will invite you to join the Food Studies Society course WeChat group to receive the latest course content and to discuss and exchange ideas with instructors and fellow students.

2. After registering on the Heyi Green Academy website’s Green Resources Library, find ‘Join a Class’ on the homepage and select the “Sustainable Food” class to begin studying.

Website: http://xue.lvziku.cn/ You can also go directly to the class page: http://xue.lvziku.cn/classroom/9/threads