Urban growing, community gardens, balcony/rooftop farming, and urban food practices.
A city office worker with zero experience picks plastic fragments by hand and tugs half-buried plastic twine on a 20-square-metre plot in the Beijing suburbs. The more she clears, the more appears—and her anxiety spreads from one field to pressing questions about recycling systems and consumption habits.
In a courtyard of barely five square metres in Hangzhou – snipping kitchen scraps, sprinkling microbial powder, turning the pile bare-handed – seven bins of compost were saved over ten months, slowly nurturing black organic matter from the reddish-brown clay.
Inspired by Nichole, a US permaculture practitioner in Texas, Zhang Yiqing learns permaculture, stops using herbicides and chemical fertilisers, grows food on large suburban front- and back-yard lawns, and reflects on American lawn culture.
I grew up in New York City, and from a young age, I loved all kinds of pickles. Little did I imagine that those delicious, crunchy, garlicky pickles would one day lead me on a journey of discovery and exploration. In truth, besides pickles, fermented products such as bread, cheese,…
In Russian, summer is also known as the ‘dacha season’. Maxim Gorky wrote a short play, translated into Chinese as *The Summer Guest*, but originally titled *Dachniki* in Russian—which more literally translates to ‘the dacha people’. In 1995, the same story was adapted into a film titled *Summer People*. The…
Vertical farm lighting accounts for 70 per cent of operating costs, and lab-grown meat is still backed by big capital — Bill Gates, Cargill and others. Changing the food system takes more than technology: it needs collective action in farmers’ markets, CSA and urban community gardens.
