When I walk around my neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, I’m always stumbling upon new raised beds and beautiful gardens on what had been vacant lots. While some grow fragrant flowers, others grow hearty greens, red tomatoes, and patches of flavorful herbs. I’ve often wandered in, a curious grower myself, only to realize that I don’t recognize half of the vegetables growing in the boxes. And there’s a reason why.
Many times, these gardens are being created, tended, and harvested by refugees. They are part of programs that offer refugees a means of self-determination and self-sufficiency, healthy food for their families, potential extra income, and a stronger connection to their new communities. The Somali Bantu Community Farm, a collaborative effort of the Somali Bantu Community Organization of WNY, Providence Farm, and the East Aurora Huddle, has been a leader for refugee-run nonprofits. The farm provides a space for Burmese refugees to grow the food they know and pass along their knowledge and culture to their family and greater community. It also provides low cost, if not free, food to other refugees. Familiar crops grow in fields, like tomatoes and zucchini, but also less familiar crops, such as okra, mace, amaranth and other native African crops. These efforts by both the local government and organizations make sure there is culturally appropriate, affordable, and healthy food available for the new residents to support a food-secure community.
When we hear the term ‘food insecurity,’ we often think about it in terms of basic access. The USDA’s definition is “the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods.” But there’s something missing there: culture and religion play a large role in our food choices. This aspect of food security is integral to helping make the U.S. a home to refugees, also referred to as New Americans. Historically, the United States has the largest refugee resettlement program in the world, welcoming over 3 million refugees from across the globe in the last 45 years.
Few people talk about cultural relevance and its role in food security because it varies so drastically across from individual to individual, no less country to country. The truth is that we have a lot to learn from other communities—how to grow produce, cook vegetables, or prepare dishes that we perhaps aren’t familiar with. In gathering around food, we can build cross cultural communication and an appreciation for those around us.
Refugees may find it challenging to maintain a healthy diet as they adjust to life in the United States, with new neighborhoods, new schools, new markets, and new foods. The typical Buffalonian consumes over 1,000 more calories each day and twice as much meat, fat, and sugar as a person in Burma—where a large number of refugees in Buffalo are from. While resettlement in the U.S. may protect refugees from severe food deprivation, the U.S. food environment brings a higher risk of diet-related diseases such as diabetes.
Supermarkets can be far from home whereas fast food and processed food is often cheap, widely available, and highly marketed. Food safety nets, such as SNAP and cash assistance, can be hard for refugees to take advantage of, due to difficulty finding information, lack of transportation, and language barriers.
These challenges and obstacles mean that nearly nine in ten refugee households in the U.S. experience food insecurity—financially, geographically, and culturally.
Tens of thousands of refugees have made their home in Buffalo, making it one of the largest refugee resettlement cities in the country. Adjustment to a new environment is challenging and food plays its own part in those challenges. Proudly nicknamed “The City of Good Neighbors,” Buffalo offers an example for other cities welcoming refugees, especially for its attention to the intersectionality of food and culture.
The Somali Bantu Community Farm, is just one of several initiatives in Buffalo that help New Americans adjust to their new homes through growing. Journey’s End Refugee Services, one of Buffalo’s four resettlement agencies, has an urban farm with programs centered around providing adult refugees with adaptive farming and marketing skills. Similarly, Grassroots Gardens of WNY (GGWNY) aids communities in getting leases to vacant, abandoned and government owned land, tests soils, provides materials to build garden beds, and has farmer educational programs geared toward New Americans learning how to grow in the cold and often unpredictable climate. People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), an organization centered around building strong, equitable and affordable housing and neighborhoods, inclusive of immigrants and refugees, has also started five community gardens on rented or government leased land, one of which is almost exclusively gardened by Burmese residents. These are just some of the ways in which the Buffalo community rallies around making sure cultural relevance in food security is not forgotten.
What’s clear is that refugee resettlement needs must be a priority for government and community partner initiatives. To meet that goal, food security needs to be measured not just in terms of calories, but cultural and social relevance. I hope to continue seeing more unfamiliar vegetables throughout my community and learn from the people around me about how food makes a home.