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The American farm-to-table movement is a modern trend started more than a century ago from a marginalized community of social outcasts: the Taishanese-Americans.

[www.washingtonpost.com]
“These were people who weren’t accepted in American society,” says Valerie Imbruce, author of “From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace,” “so they developed a food system to support their own cultural demands, leveraging trust within their own social networks.”

Just 80 years after the law was finally repealed, family-run food markets in Asian communities from coast to coast still offer high-quality produce, meat, eggs and fish at bargain prices, often using the same direct connections to farmers and fishermen established by earlier generations. It’s the children and grandchildren of the owners of those markets who are now considering how to honor those carefully developed supply chains while also expanding their customer base beyond the local Chinatown population.

“In a lot of ethnic communities, you’ll tend to see products that are chéaper and higher quality than standard supermarket options,” says Jefferson Li, 30, who, with his father, Peter, runs his family’s meat shop, 47 Division Street Trading in New York. “These are people who are just one or two generations removed from agrarian societies, so there’s culturally an expectation of fresh food that’s going to be cooked today.”

There is a long history of Asian immigrants establishing farms outside of the cities where Chinatown communities were thriving. Yee Lung Kwong and his wife Yee Dong Shee moved with their four children an hour outside New York City to rural New Jersey in 1940, seeking healthier air while growing Asian vegetables to sell in Chinatown.

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When your favorite Chinese restaurant (especially legacy Cantonese restaurants) disappears, then the entire supply chain slowly dies by a thousand cuts with it and eventually the entire ecosystem of supporting mom and pop business suppliers that are also scraping by eventually wither on the vine that becomes the final nail in the coffin that once made Chinatown a community that many people once called "a home.away from home" regardless if you ever lived in Chinatown, a historically welcoming place that no other community can organically replicate.

[nextcity.org]
The Potluck Club might be putting a new spin on Cantonese cuisine, but it’s using the same unique neighborhood-based network of wholesalers and food suppliers that older generations of Chinatown restaurants use — suppliers like Kong Kee Food Corp., just around the corner from the restaurant.

“We try to source everything, or at least the majority of the stuff that we can, nearby,” Chen says. “I like being able to have this little network of purveyors. The ladies at Kong Kee are like a bunch of aunties to me.”

Chinatown has shown it can withstand one massive shock at a time. The 9/11 attacks are still fresh in everyone’s memory — the area was inside the massive plume of dust and smoke after the Twin Towers fell, and remained inside a disaster zone following that. A decade later it was Hurricane Sandy, when the overflowing East River flooded much of the neighborhood. While each disaster changed the neighborhood, the unique supply chain that delivers the food defining so much of what Chinatown is has survived.

The confluence of these three big shocks — the jail, Anti-Asian hate, the post-COVID world — is introducing a new degree of uncertainty. Some long-established restaurants have closed, others have reduced their footprint, others shortened their hours out of concern for workers who, until the rise of Anti-Asian violence, were frequently commuting in the early morning or late at night. The reduction in restaurant business flows upstream to the wholesalers and suppliers, who start to see their margins shrink. The Potluck Club’s co-owners are both a source of new hope while also having a hard time themselves seeing how things will play out next.


“It’s ill-effecting in a way we don’t know until it happens,” Chen says.

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My co-worker last week gave me container of phoenix claws that her neighbor friend from Taishan made for her. The phoenix claws were absolutely out of this world. The complex subtle layers of flavors marinated into the phoenix claws I sampled was an OMG gold standard. If I were to reverse engineer the recipe, then these are the subtle isolated layered ingredients of what I think I tasted: star anise, cardamom, cloves, white pepper, sweet vinegar, wine, and tangerine peels. Her recipe was really mind-blowing. That's what happens when you live in San Francisco, the culinary mecca of America...everyone here steps up their game to redefine deliciousness in San Francisco...which is our Chinese culinary tradition. Gordon Ramsey would eat his heart out if he sampled the phoenix claws that I tried last week.

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Kobo-Daishi
[www.youtube.com]

This is another in my Chinese in Africa series.

Come on...chicken feet? It's just skin and cartilage. ;-0

Can't you give them something more tasty or filling from the vast Chinese culinary tradition?

Kobo, the Cantonese dilettante.