Home Cooking

When the word “locavore” (meaning an individual who eats only locally grown produce) was named word of the year in 2007, it heralded a new age of socio-environmentally conscious dining. But while overseas chefs and restaurants are turning to their neighborhood farmers markets and adopting local produce back onto their menus, how is our own local locavore scene doing?

Locavorism was a dining norm in Hong Kong long before it became trendy among the yoga-vegan-wheatgerm crowd. People ate food from local farms simply because it was cheap and readily available, and the city’s food industry was inherently sustainable. By the late 70s and 80s, however, intersecting social and economic factors led to major shifts in the local farm scene: following the opening up of the China market and its movement towards industrial agriculture, an increasing number of Hong Kong supermarkets and restaurants switched to importing foods from the mainland. This coincided with the shifting socio-economic landscape of Hong Kong itself; as the city began to prosper, people began to move away from the production sector. Local farms lacked young blood to take over the reigns and this, in addition to the elevated dining standards of Hong Kong consumers, led local farms and breeders to become increasingly obsolete.

Thankfully, Hong Kong’s locavorous culture hasn’t been completely wiped out, and there are still some restaurants in the city that have stayed loyal to their local produce. Wan Chai’s Jai Hing, for one, stands by the quality of fresh, Hong Kong-farmed livestock. The restaurant-slash-meat shop has been serving locally farmed chicken and pork since the 1980s. Free-range farming—as opposed to the intensive approach adopted in industrial agriculture—produces meat with a more intense, natural flavor and it’s precisely this superior quality that has kept Jai Hing and its customers devoted to home-raised poultry and pork throughout the years. Jui Fook Xiao Guan in Wong Tai Sin is another eatery that has stuck with the locavore program. The menu boasts several farm-raised food items, the signature dishes being those featuring their homegrown crispy-skinned roast pork.

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