Ice plant glistening with tears: what exactly is going on?
Around 2014, a "ice plant" craze suddenly sprang up in Taiwan, China. Ice plant was billed as a luxury food, priced at over ten thousand yuan per kilogram, and the Penghu County government threw its full weight behind promoting it, not only expanding the planted area but also rolling out a whole series of ice plant dishes. The county magistrate at the time even made a grand vow to make it affordable for everyone, sharply cutting the price from ten thousand yuan per kilogram to six hundred yuan per kilogram.
A year later, many farmers reported that this stuff simply had "a market in name only but no buyers" - forget six hundred yuan per kilogram, people would not even take it at sixty yuan per kilogram. These farmers, who had planted ice plant in cooperation with the county government, ended up giving it away free to relatives and friends, and Penghu's ice plant quietly faded away into the currents of history.
African ice plant is salt-tolerant, drought-tolerant and sun-tolerant, and its nutritional content is nothing special either - plainly speaking, it is just a wild vegetable from the mountains of Africa. But the strange thing is that some people in Taiwan, China want to grow ice plant using artificial-light plant cultivation modules, commonly known as plant factories. So what exactly is being sold here? Is the myth of ice plant simply hyped up by certain unscrupulous traders in order to sell hardware equipment or lamps?
Penghu's ice plant briefly became famous, then quickly vanished from the pages. But today, I hear that some places are starting to scheme about ice plant again. All I can do is once again jog everyone's memory, in the hope that Taiwan, China's limited agricultural budget will not be wasted on strange things again.