China spent her child­hood in the moun­tains of West­ern North Car­olina eat­ing brown rice, nori, and ume­boshi and home­school­ing in the small nat­ural foods store where her mother worked. As if that wasn’t campy enough, her sum­mers were spent at the Hur­ri­cane Island Out­ward Bound School in Maine where her father worked as a chef, mak­ing fresh milled whole grain flour bread daily and teach­ing the ben­e­fits of whole foods to the Out­ward Bound students.

China moved to CA as a teenager and has worked in health food stores and var­i­ous restau­rants from Sonoma to Seat­tle to Idaho and now back to SF where she cur­rently runs the Farmer’s Mar­ket booth for La Cocina at the Sat­ur­day Ferry Plaza Mar­ket. She also works for Parisa Teas, a  chai com­pany, as a brew mas­ter and bot­tle washer extraordinaire.

She is cur­rently attend­ing City Col­lege of San Fran­cisco study­ing film pho­tog­ra­phy and is pur­su­ing her life long love of mak­ing music in her spare time. China is over­joyed to be a part of La Cocina where she is daily inspired by the ded­i­ca­tion and cre­ativ­ity of the peo­ple who run their busi­nesses there, as well as work­ing at the mar­ket and being part of the local and sus­tain­able food movement.

Favorite foods: almost any­thing pick­led, col­lared greens, fried okra

email: china@lacocinasf.org