Britain turned the world into a source of food, weaving the inequalities of class, race and species into a single food system: the famines in Ireland and India, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and industrialised slaughter all sprang from it.
Former agriculture reporter Xie Xiaodan spent two and a half years at a financial media outlet, drawing most stories from listed companies’ earnings reports. A chance lead on abscessed pig meat proved impossible to trace; a ten-square-metre vegetable plot was destroyed by torrential rain; she lost her job.
In Puer, Yunnan, a South American crop shortfall has kept green bean prices rising for a year running, but erratic rainfall and extreme weather still threaten the harvest. Some local farmers are processing their own beans, planting green manure and shade trees to cope with the climate and find steadier prices.
In a small town in eastern Sichuan, at a modern slaughterhouse park invested in by the author’s aunt, cattle and sheep orders, retail cuts and pre-dawn deliveries make up daily life; customer complaints and workshop smells expose how industrialised slaughter is hidden from everyday life.
Sold-out sourdough bread, olive oil, sea salt and vinegar are going viral as UK consumers use ‘anti-ultra-processed food’ and social-media aesthetics to turn affordable basic staples into pricier lifestyle purchases.
A young couple who returned home to sell lychees made 4,503 yuan from 51 orders, but shipping and packaging cost 1,526 yuan — roughly a third of their total revenue.
The “Reiwa rice riot” pushed 5 kg of Koshihikari to ¥5,072, yet doubled prices cannot save Japan’s paddies: decades of the acreage-reduction policy have kept prices depressed, 70% of farmers are over 65, more than 10,000 hectares vanish each year, and young people won’t take over.
American writer Susan Freinkel traces in Plastic Wars plastic’s spread from a Second World War military material to 400 million tonnes of global annual consumption, arguing the problem lies not in the material but in how throwaway consumer culture shaped it into a dependency hard to shed.
Tracing how cattle from rancher Heller, whom Brazilian police called “the greatest destroyer of the Amazon rainforest,” moved from illegally deforested ranches to legal abattoirs, then to four Hong Kong trading companies — while import checks focused on food safety, with no requirement to trace the source of deforestation.
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…