Associate Professor Zhong Shuru of Sun Yat-sen University brings her new book China’s Wet Markets to Beijing: Saturday morning browsing the organic farmers’ market, an evening conversation on the past, present, and future of wet markets.
A state-owned agricultural company in a development zone on the lower Yangtze runs a mini-program for the district agricultural committee, deploying marketing calendars, brand packaging and community livestreams in turn. The one who actually moves volume, though, is a supplier selling through WeChat groups and 181 downline group leaders.
A cook flying from Chiang Mai to Shanghai for a pop-up dinner ran straight into Dianping’s rating system: one V8 user’s negative review can knock half a star off overnight, a grey bad-review deletion chain churns in its wake, and the cook at its end can only apologise.
Five years ago, Kouzi broke raw ground from scratch and hand-built a self-sufficient one-person farm; her health indicators are now better than they were twenty years ago. This past year, she has still been fighting a lawsuit over fabrications generated by Baidu AI.
Dutch grower Metske went from the squatting movement and a vegetarian restaurant to a 6½-acre organic vegetable farm at Bore Place, Kent. He now sells lettuce and tomatoes at the Growing Communities market in north London, running the farm on contacts and sales channels – no subsidies.
A student at the University of Food Studies in Pollenzo recalls three unbroken hours of lectures, wild greens from the fields, cheese markets, and a glass of wine on a blizzard night — how Petrini turned food into politics, and the road Slow Food has yet to walk.
Foodthink screens four films by the shores of Tuanjie Lake, about delivery riders, rice farmers, herders and fermentation artisans. After each screening, join the directors and protagonists for a chat about the labour and cost behind food; before each one, browse the farmers’ market.
Farmers in K Village, northeastern Thailand, have self-bred more than 250 local rice varieties and sell organic rice direct via e-commerce. With their rice cooperative incubated by the village credit cooperative, they need no subsidies even as prices fell 30 per cent.
The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s Concentra platform in Belo Horizonte integrates warehousing, compliance certification, brand development and government procurement to bring dispersed smallholders’ ecological farm produce to market at scale, offering a reference for organisationally tackling smallholders’ market predicament.
In the small fishing villages of Satun and Trang in southern Thailand, fishers walk into mangroves for crabs and shellfish, run bamboo-raft tours in national parks, and co-run a restaurant and chilli paste workshop—turning the sea they fought for into a family livelihood.