Foodthink Says “Six months of drought, six months of flooding.” Farmers in parts of Guangxi are experiencing unprecedented natural disasters. First came a once-in-60-year drought. From November last year to April this year, average precipitation in Guangxi was nearly 70% lower than usual—the lowest since complete meteorological records began in…
This episode of Food Talk is a casual conversation recorded at “Ji Shi”, the physical store of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market in Sanyuanqiao. We are joined by two old friends: Kang Li and Jin Peng. One is an Yi woman from Chuxiong, Yunnan, who funded her education through the…
The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at a rate of millions of hectares per year. In the first two decades of the 21st century, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon covered as much as 44 million hectares—an area larger than China’s Yunnan Province. Livestock development is the primary driver of illegal deforestation;…
Foodthink Says It’s time for another 618 shopping festival. After the excitement of “buy, buy, buy” and “unbox, unbox, unbox”, have you ever wondered where all that plastic packaging we’ve swept out of our homes actually goes? “Eating well” means more than just enjoying our food; it means protecting our…
In 2023, I arrived in Melbourne, the specialty coffee capital, on a Working Holiday Visa to work and learn. However, due to a lack of experience and the sheer number of young workers in Melbourne, I couldn’t sustain myself on a part-time cafe job alone. I happened to see people…
I. Plastic: The Skeleton of Modern Life Can we really function in the modern world without plastic? When an American writer decided to challenge herself to spend “one whole day without touching plastic”, she quickly realised that modern life is almost impossible to navigate without it. Ten seconds after waking…
Foodthink’s Take 5 June is World Environment Day, and Foodthink continues to monitor the link between global meat consumption and illegal deforestation in the Amazon. At the start of 2024, a joint investigation by the *Hong Kong Free Press* (HKFP) and the non-profit organisation Repórter Brasil revealed that four Hong…
Summer arrives, and with it, another season for watermelon. Watermelons are inseparable from summer, just as the farmers behind the fruit evolve alongside their crop. Wherever there is land, you will find the watermelon farmers of Taizhou. Their history of enterprise dates back to the 1980s, forming another chapter in…
Foodthink Says Since this spring, Shaanxi has experienced its most severe drought since 1961. Combined with extreme weather such as high temperatures, strong winds, and sandstorms, these compound disasters have seriously threatened agricultural production and rural livelihoods. In May, with the support of the Oxfam Hong Kong Beijing office, Foodthink…
I am someone who succumbed to pressure; I couldn’t keep playing this game of racing between skyscrapers. Now, I write my story in the hope that as a “failed player” still in flight, I can identify from those past “failures” the things that truly made me feel lonely and depressed,…
