THE PEOPLE’S
FARM TO TABLE
Asian Counseling and Referral Services brings local produce to people in need
WRITTEN BY JESSE KOJI FUKUMOTO
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SAM ZAPPOLA
Chef Keuan Saechao has 150, maybe 180 diners on the books on any given day. She delegates vegetable prep to her other cooks and handles the meat herself. Saechao’s menu changes daily and doesn’t repeat a dish even once over the course of the month. As her produce deliveries come in, she thinks on how best to prepare each item. A-choy, a tender Taiwanese green from a local farm, can be steamed or stir fried, pairs well with beef or pork, and makes Saecho muse. As the lunch rush approaches, Saechao rolls up her sleeves to bring food to her adoring guests at Asian Counseling and Referral Services (ACRS).
Yes, this is farm to table, but not at the price tag one might expect: The meals are free.
The ACRS is a non-profit organization serving the holistic health of Asians, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders (A&NH/PIs), and other communities in need. It was founded in the ’70s in response to the lack of appropriate support for Seattle’s many distinct Asian communities. Nowadays, its programming ranges from immigration assistance, to senior services, to behavioral health and wellness, and, in 2025, the ACRS food bank and senior lunch programs provided almost a million pounds of food to nearly 5,000 clients across 24 community-affiliated sites.
While Asians as a whole in King County are slightly below the county average for food insecurity, immigrant communities and more ethnically diverse neighborhoods in South Seattle see higher rates of food insecurity. From a clinically caloric perspective, this is a concerning portrait, however food contains more than its nutritive density. This isn’t lost on the ACRS.
One of the early goals of the ACRS was to provide culturally specific foods to Asian communities around Seattle. More recently, they’ve expanded their food programming to consider how their food is grown, and by whom. By partnering with local Asian-owned farms, the ACRS is helping feed local people in need, while supporting the systems and farmers making that food available. This work is under threat as the Trump administration defunds the social safety net, but the ACRS is diversifying and building resilience by slowly moving some of its food production in-house, through its own local farmland.
The a-choy on the menu this week? It comes from the ACRS’s own farm.
Culturally Appropriate Food
The shelves of the ACRS food bank don’t stock the standard government cheese or canned beans. Tofu, rice, and noodles share space with daikon, a-choy, and perilla leaf.
“To my knowledge, we’re the largest or even the only food bank in the state that is specifically dedicated to providing and purchasing culture relevant food for our clients,” said Liza Javier, the senior development & communications manager at the ACRS. “The Asian communities are not a monolith, and there are different levels of need.”
Soon after its founding, members of the ACRS noticed that their communities were not being appropriately served by the existing food banks. The ACRS opened its food bank in 1981. Today, clients line up early to shop the aisles of the food bank, arranged similar to a grocery store. This design aspect was important for making the experience comfortable and enjoyable for clients, Javier told me.
The food bank was initially successful in bringing food to people in need, but it wasn’t necessarily the types of foods that these communities needed.
“A lot of the immigrants couldn't actually eat cheese, basically. Nobody knew how to cook it,” Javier said.
The ACRS went as far as creating a cookbook for cheese to try and make it more approachable for the receiving communities. In response to a lack of culturally relevant foods, community members Sam Mutsui, and Herb and Bertha Tsuchiya started Walk For Rice, a fundraiser to purchase culturally relevant food. This year, Walk for Rice raised nearly $300,000 in its 26th year, and has moved to Seward Park in order to accommodate the increase in scale.
“We have maybe about a thousand people participate, and it has become a real community fundraiser. All of the funds go towards purchasing culturally relevant food staples, like rice, tofu, proteins, noodles: things that most food banks won’t provide,” said Javier.
Efforts like Walk For Rice allow the ACRS to weather the downturns in donations or changes to government policy. Miguel Saldin, the nutrition program manager at the ACRS, said donations have been “really down,” to the tune of 50 to 75 percent.
“That's why we have a lot of different legs right now, especially with SNAP cuts and the general climate,” Javier said, explaining that ACRS is largely funded by government grants and contracts, as well as support from foundations, corporations, and fundraisers. “Donations right now are really important for us, because it allows us to be flexible and responsive to those changes in public funding.”
Green to Green
In 2023, the ACRS received a grant from the Washington State Department of Agriculture that allowed them to purchase from local farms. Today, they purchase vegetables from seven Asian-owned farms around King County.
“Fundamentally speaking, we believe that everybody should have access to local produce that's culturally relevant and that's grown intentionally with care for the soil and people in mind,” said Koji Pingry of Makanai Farm on Vashon Island. Pingry and his wife Lizzy Jansen have been selling vegetables to the ACRS since 2023. “Because of the cost of things at the farmer's market, access can be prohibitive,” Pingry said.
Makanai Farm sells at the University District farmers market, where they have a strong clientele who seek out their Asian vegetables. Having access to Asian communities is especially important to them, given what they grow.
“We are growing a lot of East Asian vegetables and it feels very special to bring further access to those vegetables,” Pingry said.
Elizabeth Whitman and Steven Hsieh of Tian Tian Farm, also on Vashon, initially started selling to the ACRS through the Growing for Good grant in 2023.
“From the beginning for our farm we always wanted to be able to have some sort of access element,” Whitman said, “but it's hard to be a small farm and get your vegetables to lower-income families.”
Whitman and Hsieh began selling to the ACRS directly the following year. Their respective Chinese and Taiwanese heritage informed their decisions to primarily grow Asian vegetables. They enjoy seeing their vegetables being shared with people they can see as their own grandparents or relatives, Whitman said.
“I can't just grow vegetables and give them to people, because we don't live in a world that allows that. The fact that ACRS can pay us, that makes it possible. It’s this awesome trifecta,” she said.
An In-house Farm
“You have to see the farm,” Saldin told me as community members added freshly harvested a-choy to their bags at the food bank.
Tucked between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and the Cheasty Greenspace in Columbia City is a farm operated by the ACRS. The ACRS took over management of the one-acre farm in 2018. Yu Chen, who’s originally from Vietnam and was once a client at the ACRS, now manages the farm. She brings life out of every nook and cranny of the space, vertical planes included.
When I visited Yu Chen and the farm, she'd just finished harvesting and packing nearly 500 pounds of a-choy. Yu Chen didn’t skip a beat sharing all of the different things growing in the impossibly dense urban farmland. Goji berries, herbs, more a-choy.
“Take this,” Yu Chen said, handing me a bag of plums, a-choy, and figs. She also grows a medicinal garden; those herbs and vegetables have made their way to the foodbank, Javier added, and “the elders know exactly what it is.” The leaves of the goji berry plant can be used for medicinal tea, Yu Chen told me.
She’s been “blowing it away,” Saldin told me: having already grown 6,500 pounds of food this year, up from 5,000 pounds a few years back. Yu Chen’s efforts enable the farm to produce vegetables in the winter, extending the ACRS’s seasonal access to local produce.
Lao, Mien, and Hmong communities use a section of the farm; they occasionally exchange produce and swap stories. And Saldin’s assumed the role of apiary apprentice, helping out with the farm’s two hives, aiming to provide healthy honey to local community members.
With an eye for the next generation, ACRS plans to plant fruit trees, a long-term endeavor with bounties that future community members might harvest.
Jesse Koji Fukumoto is a writer, winemaker, and cook living between Seattle, Japan, and New Zealand. He is the editor of Oden Annual, a journal of food and art.
Sam Zappola is a Seattle-based illustrator, concept artist, and storyteller. Check out her work, including her previous dispatch for CHUM from the Seahawks’ Super Bowl parade.