Clarissa Wei is an American-Taiwanese freelance journalist who relocated from Hong Kong to Taipei so she could tend to her own 900 sq ft plot garden called Arcadia, on the outskirts of the city,.
Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, VICE, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Monocle, Eater, Bon Appetit, Nikkei Asian Review, CNN, NPR, among others. She is the host and producer of Climate Cuisine, a podcast part of the Whetstone Radio Collective that explores how sustainable crops are used in similar climate zones around the world.
Previously, Clarissa was a senior reporter at Goldthread, a video-centric imprint of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, where she made over 100 videos on the food and culture of the greater China area. Her award-winning videos have been syndicated on Discovery Asia-Pacific and received a Webby nomination in 2021. In 2015, her VICE piece on working conditions in a Nicaraguan rum factory led to an industry-wide boycott of the company, which sparked major systematic changes in the country's sugarcane industry.
Clarissa has visited and filed stories from 23 provinces in China as a backpacking journalist, and was once a volcano hiking guide in Nicaragua. She is currently working on her first cookbook, Made In Taiwan.
