Farmers’ markets, solidarity economies, community-supported agriculture, local food systems, and PGS.
Before starting my internship at Letian Bay Farm, I had imagined that the customers here were all fervent environmentalists; otherwise, there was no way to explain why these urbanites would travel to the countryside. In an age where everyone is flocking to the cities, taking a path in the opposite…
Taking the high-speed rail from the south exit of Xizhimen, we crossed the peaks of the Yanshan Mountains and arrived at the Huailai Basin. Though it had been less than an hour since leaving Beijing, the scenery had already completely transformed—into wide, flat plains and stretches of maize fields and…
“Whenever I arrive in a foreign land, the first thing I do is ask the locals where the market is.” In June this year, mirroring the experiences of food writer Han Liangyi in *Wandering Through the World’s Markets*, I embarked on a journey of markets in Barcelona, Spain. Of the…
Key Takeaways The profitability of the practice has given rise to ‘professional counterfeit hunting’. After the Food Safety Law introduced a punitive damages system, increasing compensation from three-fold to ten-fold, a surge of professional hunters entered the food sector, where there was previously little to be gained. While this has…
Over the last forty years, and particularly the last decade, China’s food system has undergone seismic shifts. Many of us have observed and experienced this: traditional wet markets are quietly vanishing from mainstream life, replaced by fresh-food e-commerce and online shopping as the primary sources for urban dwellers; cheap delivery…
Letian Bay Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai, is certainly not your conventional eco-farm. When I began my internship here in March, I quickly realised that agriculture here was quite different from what I had imagined: it wasn’t just about farming, but also about leasing land and hosting events. It is truly…
Foodthink says In 1924, Fei Dasheng and the teachers and students of the Jiangsu Provincial Girls’ Sericulture School arrived at Kaixiangong Village in Wujiang County to establish the Silk Improvement Society; nearly 100 years have passed since then. Their goal was to reverse the decline of the silk industry and…
During my three-month internship at Xingfuguo Baicaoyuan, the passage of time became a blur. I seem to remember only that the skies were overcast when I arrived, and bright and clear when I departed. I. Finding Baicaoyuan: A New ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ Xingfuguo Baicaoyuan is a farm located in Guigang,…
In this episode, the Food Talk hosts are joined by an old friend, Shu Meng, who holds a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University. Our discussion takes its starting point from Shu Meng’s popular article, ‘The Bigger the Fridge, the Worse the Diet? The Food System in American Middle-Class Fridges’.…
At the start of this year, four years after moving to the Netherlands, my partner and I finally rented a hectare of land in the province of Utrecht to begin cultivating my own farm. Before deciding to commit to farming, I had interned at several small organic farms across the…
