Food, Ecology, and Education

Abstract

This chapter touches on the other three main topics in Bishan’s practices: food, ecology and education. The author discusses the “politics of eating” based on Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Agriculture was invented to feed human beings, and later food production and distribution depended on political intervention (such as Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression), while it also faces moral dilemma such as food sovereignty, land justice and animal ethics; The environmental crisis in 1960s made organic agriculture a new spiritual worship in United States, and the coexistence of industrialized “big organic” and family farm’s “small organic” reached a consensus on ecology protection, which is also used by today’s capitalists to attract food buyers. When writing on education, the author takes the Nanjing-based artist Liu Xun’s children’s picture books as an example, emphasizing the cultivation of children’s sense of reality: Children can’t grow up only in the hothouses with beautiful fairy tales, but should gain their social ability in reality; The villages like Bishan have inherited their own “local knowledge” orally for thousands of years, it comes from life experience and is taught in the fields, can’t be seen in textbooks in the classrooms, and has nurtured new generations of rural community in the past, guiding the rural life and production; The so-called “life education” is not the originality of John Dewey or Tao Xingzhi – it actually has a long history in rural China and should be reintroduced into contemporary educational practice.