What is “living” and “dead” food? What can Sichuan teach us about the impacts of U.S. food access? And how can fermentation help us function in relationship with the land?

This workshop will explore these questions, and more. Participants will learn traditional Sichuan lactofermentation techniques, taste unique urban ferments, and take home their own 泡菜 (pàocài) jar crafted with specialty farm/artisan ingredients sourced from Sichuan.

Local produce and well salt supplied in collaboration with Choy Division (https://www.instagram.com/choydivision/) and Syracuse Salt Co (https://syracusesaltco.com/).

—

Wèi 味 Collective (味·集社) (https://www.instagram.com/wei.collective/) is on a mission to amplify Sichuan’s ancestral and contemporary foodways.

We are the first cross-cultural, Sichuan-run central platform bridging the province’s mainland and diasporic producers, businesses, writers, restaurateurs, and especially farmers, growers, and foragers—the heart of Sichuan’s agricultural heritage.

Launched in August 2025 by Kathy Yuan, Wèi Collective’s community building initiatives will include online resource mapping & knowledge shares; bilingual career development opportunities & internships for Sichuan students; in-person programming & small biz partnerships in collaboration with @thinkchinatown (NYC); land-to-table/mountain-to-basin tours (Sichuan); and more to come.

味 (wèi) is a Chinese character for taste, aroma, flavor. Wèi 味 Collective was founded to create a community centering Sichuan voices: our tastemakers, especially from the mainland. In the West, Sichuan food has never been more popular or reductive. We want the world to know there’s more.

—

Zoe Yang (https://www.instagram.com/jingtastic/): Nanjing-bred culinary brazenness. Radical forager. Transforming consciousness & ancestral/local ecologies in the home kitchen, often via the pickle jar.

You can find her cooling outside the auto body shop with the most productive ginkgo trees; machete-hacking upstate; tracing perennial bounty in the Bronx planted by immigrant ancestors past; chasing magnolia blooms to tempura in Brooklyn; hauling out bamboo stalks from the choicest New Jersey suburbs to slice up at the Bed-Stuy Home Depot (peak kathy tip!); and in general, fearlessly traversing the forbidden outreaches of the city in search of such ephemeral threads to the land.

She teaches all this and the critical intersections of foraging and identity in private lessons and public workshops. Zoe has been writing (and eating) feverishly about foraging, cooking, food, restaurants, and Chinese wine in NYC across personal, academic, and commercial publications for over 16 years. Catch her on Substack for more.

Most recently, she was featured in the documentary Eating Spring by Yuanya Feng and Huiyi Chen. Zoe now works with the Queens Botanical Garden on a seasonal basis to root traditional Chinese plant knowledge in local space: edible plant knowledge walking tours, zongzi-making workshops using native plant materials, and fermentation sessions.