About Us
We envision a future where AAPI communities are farming in rhythm with seasons, restoring reciprocal relationships with land, regionally adapting ancestral foodways for future generations, and ensuring food security for AAPI households. We strengthen relationships between growers upstate NY and communities in NYC, and our efforts will manifest primarily through community farming experiences, market gatherings, preserving ancestral foodways, facilitating community education, and storytelling.
Our team met through the National Young Farmers Coalition and built relationships through the Asian Farmers affinity caucus.* Our collective backgrounds include farming, education, urban planning, and design.
We share an understanding that new generations of farmers not only inherit the responsibility to feed people, but to address the challenges of climate chaos and increasing social inequities. We follow indigenous and Black leaders worldwide by prioritizing our energy towards restoring the health of our local ecology and communities.
Like many diaspora peoples, we grapple with how to preserve and adapt the traditions that allowed our East-Asian ancestors to sustain soil fertility and themselves for centuries. We center cultural traditions in our work to draw connections between heritage and the present land we live on, and instill a sense of belonging to land and one another.
*Less than 1% of farmers in the U.S. identify as Asian (NBC)
Choy Commons borrows “Choy,” the romanized word for 菜, meaning leaf vegetable in Cantonese. While bok choy has origins in the Yangtze River Delta, its familiar categorization as “Asian” food parallels the perception of “Asian American” as a homogenized identity. The plant’s story captures both our dissonance with this experience and the solidarity and community we find as Asian diaspora in America.
We offer “Commons” to describe our efforts towards reciprocity with land and one another. Cultivating a shared commons of food, land, resources and labor is an act towards our collective liberation.
“菜樂市集” combines vegetables (菜), joy (樂), and market (市集). 集 also means “come together”, reminding us of our foundational history of building community through food. Thank you to Felix Wang for his thoughtful translation of our name.
