Deep Love for My Native Land: Children Who Grew Up in the Fields

We are a family that moved to Yilan in 2013, working hard to devote ourselves to eco-friendly farming.

It was simply because our child entered a school that has firm commitments to education and to food. The child often came home and excitedly said, 'The vegetables we ate today were nibbled by bugs, you know. The teacher said vegetables nibbled by bugs are the healthy and tasty ones.' Cheerful chatter like this brought a different atmosphere to our home, and it also made us start paying attention to where the food in our daily family life comes from. This school not only educated our child, it educated us as well.

In the past, whenever the child made a fuss, we would stuff candy or cookies into his little mouth just to get some quiet; to get him to finish a meal, we would either let him eat in front of the TV, or randomly buy junk food. After being influenced in this way, our family dinner table began to change dramatically. We choose locally grown crops, pay attention to their origin and to the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and try not to use imported products that consume large amounts of gasoline or have high carbon emissions.

And the result of putting this into practice is that the mental and physical condition of our family members has improved to a certain degree. On top of that, because the ingredients are carefully selected and the growers are often full of stories, there is more to talk about at the dinner table. Later, little by little, we began to care about the land we live on, and about the current state of farming in Taiwan, China. Only then did we discover that this land of Taiwan, China is suffering great damage, and that our local food production is also facing great difficulties.