Nearly twenty readers share stories of success and failure from their pickle jars, starter cultures, and bran beds – from Guizhou’s White sour soup to Shanxi’s tousu, Kunming’s aubergine zhā to Hunan’s chopped chillies – local character and human warmth, pickled into flavour.
SiLi in Yunnan promotes ridge-and-furrow irrigation reduced-water rice across Kunming, Honghe and Pu’er, partnering from county agricultural technology stations to Hani terrace farmers. But along the way, farming friends discuss tillering, yield and how deep to dig a well—not emission reduction.
After Xibei’s chain-restaurant incident, takeaway, supermarket and freezer ready meals have put the breath of the wok, prices and the feeling of being deceived back on the table. Small eateries’ fresh stir-frying, international students’ dinners and homemade meals offer another path between convenience and freshness.
Typhoon Huajiasha made landfall on Hailing Island, Yangjiang; Shangchuan Island recorded gusts above Force 17 – Guangdong’s strongest ever at a national-level meteorological station. Fish rafts shattered, citrus and sugarcane flattened; farmers just over ten days from the Mid-Autumn and National Day holiday face near-total wipeout.
Coaches day after day follow the same route along the village’s carefully arranged roads, telling eco stories to inspection groups and tourists; the scorched-black field ridges charred by herbicide beneath the rice paddies are selectively hidden in the display.
From the Miao ancestors’ long migration south and the mountains’ salt scarcity, the piece traces white sour soup’s rice-water fermentation, red sour soup’s evolution through tomatoes and chillies, and the place sour soup holds in marriages, ancestral rites and festivals.
Foodthink’s research shows that rural social organisations need more than emission reduction accounting and risk assessment to build climate resilience. They must tackle livelihood issues such as hollowing out, ageing and water conservancy, and work with agricultural technology departments and grassroots governance.
On Thanksgiving 1953, Swanson & Sons, needing to clear surplus turkeys, packed meat, vegetables and sauce into compartmented aluminium trays and sold them frozen; since then, retort pouches and modified atmosphere packaging have in turn emerged, continually rewriting food’s journey.
Over three months at Xiqing Farm in Zhangziying Town, Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi saw how weeds retain moisture, ants herd aphids, and a water-starved sweet pepper turns to flowering and seeding — the living logic of land and crops behind repetitive labour.
Kouzi layers bayberries, hibiscus, aquatic plants and tuber crops in Villain Valley and pursues self-sufficiency through low-maintenance lazy farming. She also makes jam and juice from the harvest and raises a group of symbiotic ducks.
