From Beijing to Dali, Xi’an and Shanghai, across more than a dozen ecological farms: barnyard grass sways free in the rice, weeds guard the soft topsoil beneath the roses, yet Canadian goldenrod still demands a blade — in the same fields, why is the bond between people and grass so different?
Mixed-loading in tankers is only the surface issue. Supermarket vegetable oil – n-hexane-extracted, refined through two rounds of high heat – still harbours solvent residue, trans fat and excess ω-6. Low-temperature cooking and eating nuts plain are a stupid way around them.
Agricultural input dealers define “scientific farming” with rhetoric such as “foliar fertiliser nano-penetration,” pushing drone fertilising to five or six rounds a year. In 2024, with northeast maize at 1.1 yuan per jin, net profit per xiang was minimal whether farmers fertilised twice or five or six times.
Botanist Teacher Shen poses his riddle in Shangri-La’s spring, while Lin Yun of Tacheng in Weixi picks Caragana and shepherd’s purse, buys zhuyecai, and sets a table of omelettes, dumplings, and ham soup.
From Beijing, Guangzhou, and Kunming to Chiang Mai and Florida, readers share their days browsing the wet market: which stall has the tastiest tomatoes, how to strike up a chat with the vegetable auntie, and why the white-tiled stalls have fallen empty.
Wenzizi and Changjiaoling, graduates of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, created a satoyama on 30 mu of shallow hills in Beijing’s suburbs, coexisting with hailstorms, rainy seasons, and insects and birds. This year they have turned their farming experience into a new book, Farming in the Satoyama.
Designer Xu Xijing’s Berlin kitchen shelters a twenty-year-old brine from Changsha, a three-generation sourdough starter, and moulds and yeasts that turn with the seasons. The days and nights of tending microbes have anchored her to those seasons, and tethered her to people a thousand miles away.
Behind 30-minute delivery, former JD 7Fresh picker He Siqi worked 31 days. He ran 30,000 steps daily, earned just 30 paise per item, had nine minutes per order, faced scolding and fines when late, and sometimes paid his own delivery fee for a supplementary delivery.
Wheat bran sifted out during milling, repackaged as “wheat germ flour”, suddenly doubles in value; today’s rice and flour, fine-milled and laced with additives, are already ultra-processed foods — yet a home grain mill and mixed-grain and bean porridge can still restore staples to their original form.
Zhen Rui’s 450-mu farm – thirteen years of cultivation – turned to silt overnight, wiping out at least 30 million yuan. He has replanted sweet corn in heated greenhouses two kilometres away, but whether the land can be farmed again and where the money will come from remain open.
