A childhood spent in a family-run mooncake factory in Hunan, where returned cakes become pig feed and farmland gives way to factories, leaves a child unwilling to eat Mid-Autumn sweets.
Foodthink says On 19 July 2024, James C. Scott, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, passed away. Immediately, a wave of commemorative articles began to re-examine his ideas on peasants and agriculture, everyday resistance, state and society, and anarchism. James Scott began by studying peasant struggles before turning to…
From the 1844 Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers to food and farming practices in Chengdu, Beijing and Taiwan, readers can see how consumer co-operatives and farmers’ co-operatives connect producers and consumers, and explore healthy, fair and sustainable food pathways.
Our guest for this episode of Food Talk, Huang Guoliang, is a veteran rural development worker. Like many of our friends in the field, we are more accustomed to calling him “Lao Liu”. Since dedicating himself to rural reconstruction in 2005, Lao Liu has worked in the countryside for nearly…
While attending a conference in Nanning, we caught up with our old friend, Huang Yajun. A seasoned rural worker born in the 1980s, Yajun has experienced several stages of rural development over the last decade or so—from spontaneous community-led exploration to government-driven poverty alleviation and rural revitalisation. Across various villages,…
On 12 April, a week after the Grain Rain solar term, eastern Sichuan had seen several consecutive rainfalls. This provided relief from the drought that had persisted from the Lunar New Year into March, and the rice seedlings in the fields were nearing the time for transplanting. That afternoon, Yuan…
Foodthink says Since returning home in 2013 to establish the Chengdu Liangliang Farm, Tang Liang’s practice has provided a constant source of inspiration for those concerned with food and farming. In 2018, Tang Liang’s 《The Ledger and Lifestyle of a Family Farm》 offered a sincere answer to the question of…
On a windy March day in Beijing, we sat down at the Foodthink office with Tang Liang, who had travelled from his farm in Sichuan, to look back on his twelve-year journey of returning to his roots. Tang Liang was the first in his family to attend university. After graduating…
Foodthink’s Take In the final episode of the hit TV series *Blossoms Shanghai*, the protagonist, Mr Bao, quotes the famous line from *Gone with the Wind*—’Land is the only thing that lasts’—as he retires to the farmland of Chuansha on the outskirts of Shanghai. Had Mr Bao’s land not been…
My grandfather was the fourth child of his family, born in 1933. He lost his mother as a child and his father as a youth, weathering years of famine. He was a farmer throughout his life, and for a time, a cotton dresser. In his later years, his dreams grew…