Honolulu chef and food sustainability advocate Ed Kenney clearly likes to keep busy: He’s about to open his fourth restaurant, Mahina & Sun’s, joining the well-received Town, Kaimuki Superette and Mud Hen Water, and serves on the board of Ma‘o Organic Farm and other nonprofits. Still, it took a very specific kind of culinary temptation to lure him into filming the new PBS documentary series, “Family Ingredients,” two episodes of which will screen Sunday in San Francisco as part of CAAMFest 2016.

“It was never on my radar to be in front of the camera,” explains Kenney, calling from Honolulu. “(Executive producer) Heather Haunani Giugni was hounding me for a couple years to do a food/travel/ genealogy show on Hawaii’s multiethnic cultures, and I told her I don’t want to be on TV, it’s not my thing.”

But Giugni was persistent. “After a few years she came back and said, ‘We’re going to Japan with chef Alan Wong and you’re going to eat at Jiro’s of ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi,’ and I thought, “OK— I guess I can suck up my pride and do it just this once,” Kenney says, laughing.

The concept of the half-hour show also appealed to him: “Take a prominent chef here in Hawaii, find out what their favorite childhood food is and trace it back to its origins,” Kenney explains.

In the case of Wong, a co-founder of the Hawaii Regional Cuisine movement, viewers learn he was raised in Japan by a single mother “who had a hard time putting food on the table,” Kenney notes. Wong’s favorite food, not surprisingly, was an inexpensive one: tamago gake gohan, or raw egg on hot rice.

So in addition to eating at Jiro’s famous sushi nook in Tokyo, Kenney and Wong met with a farmer north of the capital who made the dish. “He showed us how his family made it, and they had grown the rice and the soybeans for the soy sauce and raised the chickens that made the eggs.”

Although Bay Area viewers will have to wait to see that pilot episode on PBS, the 2:30 p.m. Sunday screening at the Roxie screening will feature two others from the original six episodes of the 2014-15 series, which won a regional Emmy in Hawaii before being picked up nationally.

In “Pipikaula and Carne Seca,” the Hawaiian and Spanish words for dried beef, Kenney travels with Hawaiian musician and artist Kuana Torres Kahele to Waimea on the Big Island, and also to San Francisco, where they meet chef Traci Des Jardins at her Arguello restaurant in the Presidio, and Sonoma’s Rancho Petaluma Adobe.

Kahele “grew up on the Big Island riding horses, and that’s a whole part of Hawaii that people don’t often know about,” Kenney says. “They think surfing and sandy beaches, but he was drying beef into pipikaula with his grandmother. We went to Kahua Ranch, where his grandfather has ties, and we traced it back to Northern California, which at the time was Mexican.”

Des Jardins, Kenney discovers in the episode, “has Mexican lineage and grew up on a ranch in summer and ate machaca, Mexican dried beef, which has a parallel to Hawaiian pipikaula. We try to speculate about how these things ended up in Hawaii and how they originated it.”

The other episode screening Sunday hits much closer to home for Kenney, since it investigates the origins of poi —the first solid food his mother gave him as a baby—and looks at contemporary uses of the taro-based staple.

Director Ty Sanga includes scenes of Kenney with his mother, Beverly Noa, a famous Waikiki hula dancer from the 1950s to ’70s, and follows Kenney to Hanalei Valley, Kauai, where his father—Edward Kamanaloha Kenney Jr., also a well-known Waikiki entertainer—was raised. There Kenney digs in the traditional wetland taro patches that give the valley its green sheen. “The cinematography is just outstanding,” he notes.

Kenney, Giugni and producer Dan Nakasone will attend the Sunday’s screening at CAAMFest—the annual film festival of the Center for Asian American Media—which will also give Kenney a chance to dig into his favorite San Francisco restaurant. “I go straight to Nopa from the airport and it’s 11:30 at night and they’re still cooking,” he marvels.

Family Ingredients: Two episodes, 75 minutes, 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 13, at the Roxie, 3117 16th St., San Francisco. $14, $13 students and seniors. http://caamfest.com

Former Chronicle Travel Editor Jeanne Cooper writes frequently about Hawaii for The Chronicle and SFGate.