Connie Zheng

Table to Farm was a multidisciplinary project that I initiated in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the summer of 2022, while an Artist-in-Residence at the San Francisco Chinese Culture Center’s experimental art space, 41 Ross. (‘Official’ Chinese Culture Center post about this project here.) Over the course of three months while in residence, I invited visitors to utilize 41 Ross as a space for critically considering "farm to table" pathways from a diasporic Asian perspective and through the lens of San Francisco Chinatown. During my residency at 41 Ross, I organized public programs and a workshop space focused on food history, agriculture, seeds, and gardening. Elements of this space included handmade maps of food pathways, film screenings and video projections, a lending library containing books related to food systems and agricultural history, and jars full of free, non-GMO, heirloom seeds for visitors to take.

In Northern California, the "farm-to-table" movement continues to be largely linked to white, upper-middle-class culture, even as seasonal eating and use of fresh, local ingredients have been foundational aspects of numerous culinary cultures across the world. Through this project, I wanted to invite visitors to consider: how might an inverted reframing of "Table to farm" help to recenter Asian farming and cooking cultures as crucial nodes in American food history? 

Photography by Jenna Garrett.

For example, one component of this project was a crowdsourced map of food supply chains in Chinatown, also titled Table to Farm. In order to make this map, I made a rough map drawing of Chinatown on a piece of muslin, which our mapping team (consisting of team members from the Chinese Culture Center and myself) mounted onto a mobile foam board. We then carried this map around Chinatown, interviewing the owners of local food businesses — from restaurants to cafes and boba shops — about where they source their ingredients. We were amazed to learn that many of the restaurants in Chinatown buy a significant quantity of their produce from local grocers, and we followed up on our interviews by asking the grocers where they source their produce, thus tracing a network of food pathways from Chinatown table to California farm. The map is a portrait of this vibrant, self-sustaining neighborhood food ecosystem.

Photography by YY Zhu.

The public programming for this project consisted of a series of public events focused on food and "critical eating", including a community "film and food" screening series (for more information, see Cinematic Harvests) that paired food-focused independent films with themed dishes and a mooncake-themed closing event. This ‘Mooncake Harvest Party’ was the culmination of a month-long community design process that I facilitated with residents. With the assistance of the Chinese Culture Center, I worked with a group of 10 single-room occupancy (SRO) residents in Chinatown to design a pair of custom mooncake molds, which two local bakeries used to produce special mooncakes for the 2022 Mid-Autumn Festival celebration. We unveiled the final mooncakes at the party, which was covered in KQED Arts.

Photography by YY Zhu.

The mooncake project was particularly transformative for me: it entailed two mooncake design workshops with Chinatown residents, multiple rounds of testing mold prototypes with bakeries and making last-minute design changes, and hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes conversations. Prior to this project, I had never fabricated anything before, much less managed the fabrication of a mold for industrial production. I am not a professional designer, baker or sculptor. But an entire village sprung up around this project, from friends and strangers offering advice or leads for fabricators, to our partner bakeries sharing tips for how to make a good mooncake mold. To my surprise, Table to Farm became a kind of homecoming for me. It was the first time I actively worked in Chinatown and got to know many of its residents through my creative practice, despite living on the edges of the neighborhood for 5 years nearly a decade ago. I got to know people and business owners I’d passed by every day for 5 years and never had a conversation with, and the community that formed in support of this project was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

Photography by Jenna Garrett. Featured readers included Shelley Wong, Jennifer S. Cheng, Maw Shein Win, Ploi Pirapokin and Leena Joshi.