What Does Chinese Food Mean To You?

Our friends at Goldthread, a platform for visual storytelling exploring Chinese culture and its people, recently celebrated their first birthday and made this video asking "What does Chinese food mean to you?". In it, a group of Asian-American chefs and Fly By Jing founder Jenny Gao talked about their experiences growing up wanting to distance themselves from their food, their identity, and how that very thing they once rejected has become their path to finding purpose and meaning.

It wasn't always cool to pull out a school lunch of dumplings, fried rice, and other immigrant staples, but we can be proud of how much has changed since those days! We asked on Instagram what Chinese food means to you and these were some of your responses:

Essence of comfort

My entire life

Friends and family

Tradition, Roots, Gratitude and Appreciation

Home

These warmed our hearts.

In a post-Crazy Rich Asian world, its no longer so far-fetched to see an entire animated short based on the story of a dumpling, or a romantic comedy starring not one but three Asian male heartthrobs (Randall, Daniel and Keanu, anyone?) and we are here for it all.

We believe the next frontier is food. Representation is still sorely lacking on grocery store shelves, but great flavor is universal. Through our products, we're working to celebrate and normalize high quality Chinese food and flavors, and get one step closer to eradicating the wildly outdated "ethnic aisle" once and for all.