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Photo: Craig Lee
Still, as a child, Leach was curious about her heritage. Even though she was only 6 in 1988, she distinctly remembers watching the Seoul Olympics. When she got older, she’d tell people she wanted to drive a Hyundai. “I mean, what kid dreams of owning a Hyundai?” Leach quips.
After college, Leach worked in agriculture in the Pacific Northwest before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. To supplement her farming gigs, she found a part-time job in the kitchen at Camino, a respected farm-to-table restaurant in Oakland. Many chefs who worked there went on to launch projects that were representative of their heritage. It inspired Leach to do the same. Drawing on her experiences in farming and restaurant kitchens, she subleased patches of land and started cultivating Asian vegetables like perilla, or kkaennip, an herb whose broad, fragrant leaves are ubiquitous in Korean cooking—used to wrap grilled meats or seafood and in fermented pickles.
Growing the perilla came easily to Leach; figuring out what to do with it was harder. “I was more familiar with Korean plants than I was with Korean people,” Leach says. So she started bringing boxes of her produce to Korean community events. “Growing perilla was like having a friend who egged me on and pushed me out of my comfort zone,” she explains. “However vulnerable I felt, I knew I could show up with those leaves and be welcomed.”
Among those who welcomed her was chef Dennis Lee. Leach turned up unannounced at one of his restaurants in 2011 with a crate of perilla. She wasn’t a total stranger to Lee— they had mutual friends—but it was, essentially, a cold call. “At that time, it wasn’t easy to source perilla,” Lee says. Shiso, perilla’s Japanese cousin, was more readily available, but it is daintier, more floral, not perfectly suited to Lee’s Korean-influenced cooking. “So we were really psyched to have straight-up Korean perilla leaves just drop into our lap. I told Kristyn I would buy as much as she could grow,” Lee says.
Craig Lee
Those peppers, bursting with a deep, earthy heat, hail from Sunchang, a region in South Korea famous for its gochujang production. It’s just one of the heirloom varietals that Leach also preserves throughSecond Generation Seeds. The farming collective, which she co-founded, is dedicated to stewarding and improving the seed stock of Asian vegetables that are in danger of dying out, through a partnership with Japanese American-owned Kitazawa Seed Company.
It’s not hard to imagine a teenage Leach eating her first bibimbap, mulling over parallel questions about her own identity. “I don’t have those visceral moments when I taste a Korean vegetable that transport me back to my childhood,” she explains. As a seed saver, Leach must rely on the feedback of her extended Korean community as she decides what traits to emphasize in her crops year after year. “Breeding is a slow reinforcement of your personal preference. So I can love perilla for what it is, but if I’m operating in a vacuum, I may make some weird decisions.” Were it not for the community’s input, she might save only the seeds from summer’s sweetest sagwa chamoe melons. “But they’re also used for pickling,” Leach says, “so if I breed a melon that’s too sweet, the pickle won’t last. It’s not a birthright to grow these crops. I have to share them with people and hear their stories of what they should taste like and what they’re used for.”
While Leach may not have childhood memories of perilla, her 1-year-old daughter certainly will. “The other day I made her sit next to me while I packed it,” Leach says, “and I just, like, wafted it in her face. ‘Let’s justInceptionthis into your tiny brain!'” She walks along the rows of perilla she has just transplanted from the greenhouse, the tiny seedlings planted among wind-sown wildflowers. “I owe a lot of the richness of my experience of having Korean community to this plant,” Leach smiles. “It’s probably the one thing I’ll grow until I die. Even when I’m too old to farm, I’ll always have a perilla patch.”
Get the recipes
01of 03Siraegi Guk (Radish-Top Soup)Ryan LiebeView Recipe02of 03Gat Kimchi (Mustard-Green Kimchi)Ryan LiebeView Recipe03of 03Sagwa Chamoe Saelleodeu (Melon Salad)Ryan LiebeView Recipe
01of 03Siraegi Guk (Radish-Top Soup)Ryan LiebeView Recipe
01of 03
Siraegi Guk (Radish-Top Soup)
Ryan Liebe
View Recipe
02of 03Gat Kimchi (Mustard-Green Kimchi)Ryan LiebeView Recipe
02of 03
Gat Kimchi (Mustard-Green Kimchi)
03of 03Sagwa Chamoe Saelleodeu (Melon Salad)Ryan LiebeView Recipe
03of 03
Sagwa Chamoe Saelleodeu (Melon Salad)
Mackenzie Chung Fegan writes about food, drink and culture. Find her on Instagram at@mackenzie_fegan.
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