Love and Tenderness in a Bento: Saffron in Conversation with Xiaojian Shucai's Peng Xianhui (Part 1)

"Family" is a child's first learning environment after birth. Through daily life cultivation and the transmission of values, parents not only lay the foundation for their children's future learning and growth, but also cultivate the attitudes and abilities children need to face the future. At different stages of growth, the family continues to play different roles in supporting the child.

Starting from daily diet, the food on the dining table is the best scene for food education. The value of friendly food and farming is not only about food safety, but is also closely tied to the Earth's environment and animal welfare. Using "bringing a bento" - a shared life experience between parents and children - as an entry point, we have invited writer Saffron and Peng Xianhui, the proprietress of Yilan's Xiaojian Shucai, to have a exchange and share about food and farming education and parenting from the perspective of both being mothers, and to take a peek at these two moms' delicious bento secrets!

Interviewee Profiles

Saffron

Wang Bizhu, who writes under the pen name "Saffron," is a parenting/green food writer. She originally worked in advertising and the fashion industry. In order to think about the next step in her career and life, and to not be absent during the final stage of her children's childhood, she chose to leave a job that ran from nine in the morning to nine at night and began writing on a blog. With delicate and sincere writing, she recorded the process and reflections of parent-child interaction, becoming a widely trusted parenting writer. She also started from her own life to share her practice of green eating. Currently focused on home cooking research, she is now a consultant for the "Green Dining Guide" and a columnist for Agricultural Media, Okapi, Apple Daily, and others. She is the author of books including "Kitchen Little Love Song," "Views Outside the Classroom," and "What Can You Talk About with Children."

Saffron Facebook
Fan Table. Fan Table Facebook Page

Peng Xianhui

In 2014, Peng Xianhui and her husband Jiang Yingde came to Yuanshan, Yilan, and used a renovated twenty-year-old former rice milling factory as their base to establish "Xiaojian Shucai." They sell their own friendly-farmed "Xiaojian Rice," as well as Yilan friendly small-farmer crops and related foods, run a secondhand book exchange and sale, sell cultural and creative products, and also hold irregular agriculture, art, and literature events. In addition to running the shop, Peng Xianhui often shares information related to friendly farming, small-farmer home cooking, and parent-child interaction on social platforms, and is widely popular.

Xiaojian Shucai Website
Xiaojian Shucai Facebook Page

Love and Tenderness in a Bento Q&A

Q1: Both of you are practitioners of friendly food and farming in your lives, and you promote these values through farming, cooking, writing, and other means. Could you share your respective journeys of practice along the way, and how these journeys have changed your lives?

Peng Xianhui (hereafter "Peng"):At the very beginning, it was actually because of the children. Because my son Half-Orc has mild Asperger's syndrome, he had some difficulties since childhood in expression, communication, and emotional control, and was therefore refused admission by several kindergartens. After transferring to a Waldorf-system school in Taichung, where the school placed great importance on dietary control, choosing organic ingredients, eating less red meat, and completely prohibiting sugar, along with some more spiritual learning, Half-Orc's emotions gradually became more stable.

From that time, we began to follow the school's philosophy and adjust our diet in daily life. My husband also rented a very small plot of farmland from the Taichung City Government and started growing vegetables for our own consumption. Because it was for our own eating, we naturally chose not to use pesticides or fertilizers in the process. This experience later inspired us to move to Yilan and devote ourselves to a farming life, continuing the original friendly cultivation method. So in the practice of friendly food and farming, at the beginning there was not any lofty philosophy.

Saffron (hereafter "Fan"):Like Xianhui, it was also because of my child. I was originally an office worker, and at that time meals were mainly eaten out. More than twenty years ago, the concept of friendly food and farming was not yet so widespread, and I did not have any particular thoughts about diet either. After becoming a mother, I began to read and research, thinking about what kind of diet to give my child.

"Colostrum" can be said to be a mother's first choice regarding her child's diet. At that time, starting from breastfeeding, I became more and more particular about diet. Breastfeeding was actually very difficult, but the books wrote about the importance of colostrum and how good breast milk's nutrition was, so for my child I persisted just like that.

As my child grew, the need for food at each stage was also different. I began to pay more attention to the source of ingredients and came into contact with the Homemakers United Foundation, and started buying organic, non-GMO ingredients. At that time, topics in this area were just beginning to be discussed, and everyone around me thought I was strange. Some even worried that I had been scammed, asking why I bought such expensive vegetables.By comparison, I think people today are very fortunate, because when pursuing safe and reassuring ingredients, there are so many choices.

Q2: From the perspective of mothers, what kind of influence do both of you hope to bring to your children through practicing the values of friendly food and farming in daily life?

Peng:After coming to Yilan to farm, I gradually got to know other local farmers who were also practicing friendly principles, some growing vegetables and some producing eggs. Normally we eat ingredients grown by ourselves and by farming friends, but mom is very lazy (laughs), so occasionally we still eat out. Also, because we need to satisfy Half-Orc's big appetite, the place we eat at most often is a small hot pot restaurant. Because we are used to eating good ingredients normally, Half-Orc is especially picky about white rice and does not dare to eat vegetables or hot pot ingredients from outside. Actually, it is just because he is afraid of dying (laughs).

But my daughter Pineapple's dietary preferences are completely different. She likes fried foods and likes eating cookies. When eating out, what she most often says she wants to eat is fries, fried chicken, and pasta. I do not know why I raised two children with completely different personalities, but my own restrictions on my children's diet are not that strict. In daily life I try to give them good food as much as possible, and once a month on "only child day" I take each of them to eat what they want. As fortheir future dietary preferences and choices, I will respect them.

Fan:Actually, Xianhui and her family are in such an environment, eating good ingredients every day that city people would envy! As for my part, when my children were in elementary school I controlled their diet rather strictly. For sweets given to the children, I placed great importance on the source of ingredients and factory registration numbers, and I also tried as much as possible to make desserts myself, so from a young age I took them to make chiffon cake and macarons.

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