I.“You have been penalised and demoted to shop assistant” “You have been penalised and demoted to store clerk.” A few months ago, Ms L, a store manager at a Convenience Bee branch in Beijing, suddenly received this message on her handheld terminal. In her daily routine, she had to keep…
Foodthink Says The rainfall in the south this year has been distressing; we have not only seen the devastation in the news but have also received a steady stream of bad news from our farming friends about reduced yields. Our old friend Kouzi, based in Fujian, has seen almost total…
6 July is International Co-operatives Day, and this year’s theme is “Co-operatives Build a Better Future for All”. The co-operative movement is a global social phenomenon. Since the founding of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in 1844, co-operatives have evolved over 180 years, taking root and flourishing across the…
Our guest for this episode of Food Talk, Huang Guoliang, is a veteran rural development worker. Like many of our friends in the field, we are more accustomed to calling him “Lao Liu”. Since dedicating himself to rural reconstruction in 2005, Lao Liu has worked in the countryside for nearly…
Editor’s Note In the Yulin community of Chengdu, a vegetable “blind box” from farmer-friend Hu Xuemei brought a little “shock” and an unexpected change to Xia Lili, the cook of the Little Dining Table. This is the fourth instalment of “Master One-Pot’s Little Dining Table”, which will discuss Xia Lili’s…
Dehulling buckwheat seeds, grinding them into flour, mixing it with wheat flour to form a dough, and then cutting it into long, thin strands—this is how one of Japan’s most everyday foods is made. In Japanese, the word for ‘buckwheat’ (soba) is a homophone for ‘beside’. Thus, asking for ‘soba’…
I once wrote ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ and, in practice, I found that a modest plot of land is quite enough to sustain all my life’s needs. So, for someone like me living on such a plot, how much living space is actually necessary? How large should…
I. Setting Out with Questions In late March, I began a three-month internship at Guixinyuan Farm. Partly, it was to see if I was cut out for a life of agricultural labour; partly, I was searching for an ideal model of farming: what should be the relationship between agriculture and…
While attending a conference in Nanning, we caught up with our old friend, Huang Yajun. A seasoned rural worker born in the 1980s, Yajun has experienced several stages of rural development over the last decade or so—from spontaneous community-led exploration to government-driven poverty alleviation and rural revitalisation. Across various villages,…
I. My Story with Fireflies As a Northerner, I had never seen a firefly before the age of fifty; my limited knowledge was confined to the idiom “studying by the light of reflected snow and fireflies in a bag”. That was until I found myself immersed in a sea of…
