Can we still eat garlic this year? These are the things you need to know

Yesterday I went to the supermarket, originally intending to buy some garlic, but when I saw the price! "Garlic you ruthless," I'm not eating it.

After six years, "Garlic you ruthless" has made a comeback. The editor's hometown is in the countryside, and my parents are still there farming a bit of land. Our own family also grew some garlic. When the garlic was harvested, the price was less than 3 yuan per jin, and my parents thought the price was already high enough, so they sold it all. What we never expected was that the price kept soaring...

Not far from the editor is Jinxiang County, Jining, Shandong, known as the "Hometown of Chinese Garlic," where bosses who got rich off garlic are everywhere, "becoming multimillionaires overnight."

Buyers purchase garlic from farmers at relatively low prices, then store it in cold storage. Large buyers can hoard several hundred to over a thousand tons at a time. Because garlic can be kept fresh for as long as three years, this invisibly extends the hoarding cycle for buyers, allowing them to more flexibly regulate and speculate on the supply and demand market.

In Jinxiang County, there are large buyers like this. They are familiar with hot money speculation, cooperate with each other, drive up garlic prices together, and then sell off collectively, making a fortune.

This also reminds me of many years ago, when garlic was just a few cents per jin. By the roadside, in the ditches, everywhere were garlic dumped by ordinary people, and the strong smell of rotten garlic could be smelled from far away (in our dialect it's called "hu nong garlic smell").