“I started looking at a map,” says Liang, 45. “I drove to the farmers markets out of state and got to know people. I wanted produce that was really fresh and clean to bring back to the city.”
Now Liang makes a weekly eight-hour round-trip drive to pick up produce and fresh-off-the-farm eggs, continuing a Chinatown food purveyors’ time-honored tradition of cutting out the middleman — a practice that can be traced directly to the xenophobic policies that forced Asian immigrants to live in strictly separate communities, via the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
“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Just 80 years after the law was finally repealed, family-run food markets in Asian communities from coast to coast still offer high-quality produce, meat, eggs and fish at bargain prices, often using the same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 cheaper 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.”
Peter Li emigrated from China, where he learned to butcher, in 1985, eventually opening his own market and maintaining connections with friends who left the city to establish livestock farms. Building relationships with duck farmers on Long Island helped him create a market for Chinese barbecue across the community: “My dad and I can see a duck hanging in a window at a restaurant and tell you where it came from based on how fat or slim it is,” Jefferson says.
Social media brings new shoppers
But it was the frustration and fear of the pandemic’s early days that drove Jefferson to take to social media in an effort to bring business to his family’s store and help feed the local community. His pathos-laden Reddit post, by turns raw, funny and deeply personal, included lines such as: “$10 will get you something like 13 pounds of chicken drumsticks, plus a dozen eggs. Don’t like drum sticks? Fine, get something else, our prices are lower than your GPA and your parents’ expectations for you.”
Unsurprisingly, the post went viral. “I literally wrote it while I was sitting in the delivery truck,” Jefferson says. “I’d seen supermarkets charging $59.99 a pound for drumsticks. At first I thought, ‘Fine, I should do that,’ but then I thought about families like mine and the aunts and grandmas of people I grew up with. I didn’t want to be a scumbag.”
The response was big, attracting non-Asian shoppers from outside the community, often groups of people placing orders of $400 or higher. Jefferson started adding signs in English, a novelty in a store that had only Chinese language signage. As the pandemic wound down, the big orders became less frequent, but the store has still seen more diversity in its customers.
Steven Wong spent summers as a teenager on Martha’s Vineyard working in commercial fishing operations, learning about wind patterns and shouldering bags of seafood that weighed more than he did. Now 43, he and his brother Freeman, 47, are the second generation running the family business, Aqua Best, where a glistening whole branzino sells for $8.99 a pound, about $3 less than other fresh seafood purveyors around Manhattan, and fresh shrimp is at prices even lower than discount supermarkets.
“My mom instilled in us that you always go to the source,” Steven says. “So it was about building…
Read More: How Chinatown businesses are using farm-to-market ingenuity to survive