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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Leonard Shek

Leonard Shek is a product of his environment. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, his politics, life, and language are all a strange multi-cultural hybrid of the famously left and diverse region. As a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none, he juggles life as a writer, cook, graphic designer, restaurant consultant, and filmmaker.

He is the creator of kitchenstink.com, a home base for his writing, film and culinary projects. His most recent project is a film about the Guangdong Province of southern China, home of 90% of Chinese immigrants to America from the early 1800’s to WWII.

He was one of the founding members of Proletariat Bronze, a poetry and spoken word performance group featured in venues across the country. He has worked as Program Coordinator for the Chinese Historical Society of America, a museum located in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

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Tags: Shuffled!.

Popular chef/TV personality/author/world travel/general asshole Anthony Bourdain said once on his show that inside every great chef is a Chinese chef. Although he has a great tendency to fetishize both the perceived simplicity and, I guess, non-American-ness of Asian foods, I think the sentiment of this particular statement is pretty right on.

Bourdain means to say Chinese chefs don’t waste any part of the animal. Fish eyeballs, pig’s feet, rooster testicles: it’s all been cooked for thousands of years. And that’s not just the Chinese of course, it’s true all over the world, pretty much anywhere where food isn’t so removed from its original form.

It’s mostly just in this country where beef doesn’t come from a cow, it comes from the freezer.

But while connecting to food is great, it doesn’t replace connecting with people. So I’m putting this trailer up here to give my man Leonard some shine. He’s working on a film that reflects on just those issues.

So all you wealthy BPR readers out there, give the dude some cash to help him finish making this movie! Check his site out at kitchenstink.com.

Tags: Food, Movie, Video.