General Tso

SYNOPSIS
This mouthwateringly entertaining film travels the globe to unravel a captivating culinary mystery. General Tso’s chicken is a staple of Chinese-American cooking, and a ubiquitous presence on restaurant menus across the country. But just who was General Tso? And how did his chicken become emblematic of an entire national cuisine? Director Ian Cheney (King Corn, The City Dark) journeys from Shanghai to New York to the American Midwest and beyond to uncover the origins of this iconic dish, turning up surprising revelations and a host of humorous characters along the way. Told with the verve of a good detective story,The Search for General Tso is as much about food as it is a tale of the American immigrant experience. A Sundance Selects release from IFC Films.

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Value Farm

"Value Farm creates value by cultivating the land as a collective effort. The project intersects issues of urban transformation, architecture and urban agriculture with an international cultural event, and explores the possibilities of urban farming in the city and how that can integrate with community-building. It forms part of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013, within Ole Bouman’s Value Factory located at the Shekou Former Guangdong Glass Factory in Shenzhen, a site that is itself undergoing radical transformation. Responding to the Biennale’s theme of ‘Urban Border’ and Shekou’s post-industrial regeneration, Value Farm is realized as new architectural and landscape design providing permanent infrastructure for the site’s future as well as a substantial piece of performative, growing event-architecture throughout the biennale."

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Dumplings - China - Home Refrigerators

"This is not simply transforming how Chinese people grow, distribute and consume food. It also stands to become a formidable new factor in climate change; cooling is already responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of greenhouse-gas pollution. Of all the shifts in lifestyle that threaten the planet right now, perhaps not one is as important as the changing way that Chinese people eat."

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Fast Food - architecture

Interesting note on the use of "fast food" used to describe architecture...This one used for China and it's ever expanding housing market, some of which are not built to proper safety standards.

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Farmers to Urbanites

I have been following this mass population migration in China of rural farmers moving into cities and the governments initiative to make it happen. Here, another report seeking to have 60% of the population living in a city brings more than a number of questions and issues. Food, the people that grew it, the land, the cities and the food it needs. So many opportunities.

When I was living in Chongqing in 2001-2002 I traveled down the Yangze River just prior to the massive relocation. A number of villages were be completely relocated to make way for the raising waters of the Yangze dam. Traditional, ornate, sustainable villages were being uprooted to concrete, high rise cities that may have an updated infrastructure, but lacked a deep sense of place and tradition. One of those being local subsistence patterns and small scale farming.

Enter the creative solutions of people moving from rural to urban. Chickens in the bathroom to farming on the sidewalk...so many lessons to be learned and design opportunities for these new cities housing a population living between two worlds.

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