The Blue Scholars are a two-man hip hop group from Seattle, Washington who have been singing and rapping since 2002. This summer, their new video was about their favorite Asian grocery store, Fou Lee. The song is a loving homage to Seattle, a city steeped in Asian American food, both by necessity and by choice. 

Pioneering Asian American markets like Uwajimaya’s and yes, Fou Lee, have been serving fresh, affordable and culturally diverse foods to Seattleites for almost a century. When First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Healthy Food Financing Initiative to increase food access in urban areas, she failed to mention the key role of Asian American markets. They deserve at least the same tax benefits and laudatory statements as Wal-Mart and Walgreens. In the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, Asian American produce and ethnic markets are sometimes the only purveyors of fresh, affordable food that remain in inner-city neighborhoods.

Inner-city food and ethnic markets have a complicated history. During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, mainstream media focused on inter-ethnic tensions, with Korean American liquor store owners the target of violence and looting. What the media didn’t pay attention to were longstanding complaints by local residents that too many liquor stores (run by proprietors of all races) were allowed to operate in their neighborhoods, when what people actually needed was real food. As the New York Times noted five years after the riots, “lack of such vital commercial services as groceries in South-Central helped fuel the looting.” Produce and ethnic markets are key resources that Asian Americans can bring to urban communities, and such markets can become sites for cross-cultural cooperation and exploration as people learn about each other through food.

What is food if it doesn’t bring people together over a fragrant pot and make them dance? The Blue Scholars video gives star cameos to Filipino and Southeast Asian mainstays, including fish sauce, rice noodles, canned fish, longanisa sausage, and balut, a duck-embryo delicacy that hasn’t made it into Martha Stewart’s kitchen quite yet. Are we interested in growing the good food movement to reach broader audiences, accomplish more mobilization, and have more fun? Then the movement must make room for these foods and even more, celebrate them.

For Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, that means understanding our foodways and learning the tangled history (for example, of SPAM) that created them. Food binds our cultures together and fuels our churches, political organizing, celebrating, and mourning. The memories made by cooking and eating together sustain us when times get tough, or just busy. As I wrote in the introduction to Hyphen magazine’s food and agriculture section, “Food is a real link to our heritage, so we should be the ones to craft the storyline about how Asian food became hybridized in the United States.”

Food markets both reflect and create culture, which is why they must be diverse. So much of our highly mechanized, industrialized American food system over the past century has served to obfuscate difference, homogenize taste and equalize experience. That makes sense from a franchising perspective, but for culture? It’s deadly. Please honor your local Asian American grocer by shopping with them, making friends in the aisles, and advocating for their key role in the transformation of the American food system, particularly in urban areas.

Here’s to food that makes you get up and dance.