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.

You’ve probably heard that cows are bad for the environment. Their burps and farts are warming the planet. But bovine methane emissions are just the beginning of beef production’s environmental impacts. Cattle farming is one of the most resource-intensive and wasteful forms of food production.

Industrial cattle farming diverts crops that could be used for human consumption to animals. This results in huge losses as calories are converted from grain to meat: only 17-30 calories enters the human food chain per every 100 calories of edible grains fed to livestock.

 However, the energy loss is only one part of the trouble with using crops as animal feed. Globally, the growing and harvesting of soy, grain, and corn crops for animal feed accounts for one-third of arable land. To make matters worse, the agricultural industry uses 70% of the planet’s freshwater resources.

To get a better idea of why beef is so wasteful, consider Brazil. Brazil led the world in beef production in 2018. Not surprisingly, Brazil is also the largest producer of soy in the world. 

 Soy production in Brazil has more than doubled since 2000 and according to André Antonio Vasconcelos, a researcher at Global Canopy, Brazil now devotes more than 10 times the area of Switzerland to growing soybeans.  Land conversion is often a byproduct of cattle ranching due to the soy produced to feed the cattle and the physical space the cows take up. According to the World Wildlife Fund, cattle ranching and soy production are  responsible for 80% of the deforestation that occurs in the Amazon Rainforest, releasing up to 340 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. In 2016, 90% of soybean production for Brazil’s domestic market was intended to be used as animal feed, while globally 97% of soy produced goes directly to animal feed. Industrial soy agriculture is water- and fertilizer-intensive, and it needs an estimated 10,000 gallons of water per bushel (roughly equivalent to 8 gallons).

Meat in general, and beef in particular, uses resources that aren’t always accounted for. Not only are forests being ruined, but our water supply is being diverted as well. The water footprint of raising cattle for beef is estimated to be 1,800 gallons of water per pound, compared to the 576 gallons of water it takes to produce one pound of pork (still quite a lot, but not as much as beef). This means that cattle ranching and the crop irrigation needed to produce cattle are putting pressure on an already scarce resource. 

 Once cattle are the proper age and weight, they are brought to the slaughterhouse. This journey shouldn’t be dismissed. Often, they are transported 1,200 to 1,500 miles away from their original home with 40 to 45 of them crammed into a trailer. This transportation effort poses yet another strain on the environment. 

Despite the tremendous environmental costs of producing beef, the Food and Agriculture Organisation found that globally,  20%  of the 263 million tonnes of meat produced each year is wasted. But it isn’t just the meat that is wasted.  So too is the cleared land, the lost biodiversity, and the water all affected to raise those livestock. Wasted food means humans are putting pressure on land and water resources and ultimately the planet’s ability to sustain us, only to throw away a large portion of the world’s food supply.

 However, there could be a solution to both of these problems: using food waste as animal feed. Food waste is a global problem, with ⅓ of the world’s food supply or 1.3 billion tons wasted annually. Utilizing food waste as animal feed, instead of feeding them grain and soy, would be extremely beneficial to reducing annual global food waste.   

From New York to San Francisco, United States cities are establishing bans on commercial food industries from dumping organic and food industry waste into landfills. You’re probably wondering: what happens to all this organic waste? Well, for example, in Massachusetts, the Department of Environmental Protection requires that organic and food industry waste be composted, used for anaerobic digestion, or animal feed. 

Justin Kamine discusses how his company,  Kamine Development, headquartered Bedminster, New Jersey,  is working to find ways to convert food waste into animal feed faster. He says, “if we could capture those nutrients that very same day and immediately turn it into a soil amendment or pelletized animal feed the very next day, we could create healthier, more profitable, and sustainable solutions for supermarkets, farmers, and consumers.” Working on finding sustainable solutions to agriculture, the company developed a technology that recycles an estimated 30tons of fresh food waste into fertilizer and animal feed in just three hours.

Do you think about where your food comes from? How many resources go into producing it? There’s an opportunity to minimize the land and water resources that the livestock industry currently depletes if we were to just recycle our food waste to animal feed. Let’s kill two birds with one stone. 

Rarely does a film portray a state of affairs so accurately that its fictional characters and storylines overwrite the actual historical events that transpired. But cinephile or not, ask any Angeleno what happened during the California Water Wars, and they will likely tell some version of Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown. Everyone agrees that the film’s fictional dramatization of California water politics has become a part of history as much as, if not more than, the past itself. 

And for good reason; Chinatown is commonly regarded as the best screenplay of all time. Using modern neo-noir camera techniques to capture the beloved elements of a classic detective-noir storyline, the film could certainly sustain its longstanding universal acclaim on its cinematography alone. But what keeps Chinatown alive in our collective consciousness 50 years later is that its central message still rings true: Behind every great fortune, there exists great crime. 

Chinatown conveys this message through a fast-moving storyline depicting Los Angeles public officials and wealthy investors who, motivated by greed and power, lead a secretive effort to siphon water from distant agricultural regions to the city for a profit. Through an exhilarating series of twists and turns characteristic of film noir (think murder, adultery, and fraud– there’s no shortage of gunshots, sex, or opulence in this movie), audiences decode the ugly truth: In California water politics, leadership is corrupt. So long as these officials have money and power, they will exploit the people and resources that they preside over to keep themselves on top. The oligarchy, no matter the actions of the common man, will always win. 

Why was this message relevant in the real world in 1974? And why is it still relevant today?  The answer is that in many ways Chinatown isn’t fictional at all. 

The film’s narrative parallels the real-life story of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. In the early 1900s, as the growing desert metropolis began to outgrow its water supply, a few powerful officials from the Los Angeles Water Company weaseled their way into obtaining water rights to lakes and rivers hundreds of miles away. They did so using tactics similar to those of the villainous characters in the movie. They cheated financially desperate Owens Valley farmers out of their land by buying it for a price that was enticing for the penniless farmers, but not nearly representative of the land’s actual value. Then, they utilized the water rights that they acquired from these bargains for their own financial gain. 

Consider Los Angeles Water Company superintendent William Mulholland. In 1905, he purposefully overestimated the water needs of the city in order to funnel more water from Owens Valley to LA. Then, he secretly allocated the extra water to farming operations in the nearby San Fernando Valley, generating huge amounts of profit for a group of wealthy investors with whom he was allied and leaving rural valley farmers (who had sold them the land) behind in the dust.

This is just one historic example of how a few powerful individuals seized power and riches by commandeering California’s water supply. In Chinatown, the names have been changed, and the events have been reworked and rearranged, but the fundamentals remain the same.  That makes the film’s critique of greed and inequality entirely accurate to what actually happened.

And in some ways, what is still happening. In 2020, rural valley farmers are fighting a losing battle against coastal cities for access to water from the aqueducts and canals constructed in the 20th century. Just as Mulholland did, those with the money and power today get to decide where the water goes, and right now most of it is being funneled straight to Los Angeles. Climate change is only making things worse as drought conditions intensify and water becomes increasingly scarce. Plots of farmland are drying up; yet the grass in Beverly Hills has never looked greener.

Considering these realities, it is clear why Chinatown has such staying power. The film functions as a vehicle for the public’s understanding of what was, and is, in reality, a complex entanglement of private firms, government agencies, small-town farmers, and Los Angeles urbanites. It simplifies the deception, abuse of power, and utter negligence of the early 1900’s water politics to reveal the unjust dynamic between the powerful and the overpowered. Indeed, the film’s message is as universal as it’s critical acclaim.

For this, Chinatown deserves recognition. It’s thematic elements simultaneously entertain and provoke an important question to audiences who might otherwise go uninformed: Who lavishes in the fortunes created by California water, and who are the victims that pay the price?

In these long days of COVID-19 quarantining, I rarely leave the house except to go to the grocery store. I, along with everyone else, am out buying food for multiple family members and friends. The stores are still bustling, and the carts piled high with fresh produce, shelf-stable products, and so many cleaning supplies. I gear up with masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer to prepare for those carts that come a little too close for comfort. Everyone is buying what they can, but not always what they need, for a sense of security.

I’m shocked to see empty shelves as I pass through aisles, the after-effect of shortage threats and widespread stockpiling. The image of abundance and prosperity grocery stores represent has been suddenly broken.

What’s the story on the other side of the grocery store shelves? Farmworkers are essential to making sure the country has food, but they aren’t afforded the same precautions and treatment that many others are, which puts them at a higher risk than the general public. Not only is this a consequence of health inequity in the U.S., it is already destabilizing a food system that has already proven to be more fragile than I could have imagined.

There are about 3 million farmworkers across the U.S. hired to harvest fruit, vegetables and nuts as well as tend livestock on farms. While roughly 1.2 million to 1.75 million farmworkers are undocumented, 200,000 come seasonally on an H-2A guest worker visa—a program that has been thrown into disarray due to the tighter restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmer advocacy group, fears a shortage of H-2A workers will lead to food shortages and economic hardship for U.S. farmers. Last year 87,000 H-2A jobs were certified in the second quarter (April-June), making it the busiest time of year.

“The decision to halt visa application processing in Mexico will restrict the number of immigrant workers being allowed to enter the country,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the Farm Bureau. “Under the new restrictions, American farmers will not have access to all of the skilled immigrant labor needed at a critical time in the planting season. This threatens our ability to put food on Americans’ tables.”

In early March, Armando Elenes, secretary treasurer of the nation’s largest farmworkers union, United Farm Workers, informally surveyed workers on how much information they had received about the coronavirus from their employers. Of the 220 respondents, 90% had received no information at all. No information about the virus, no instructions for disinfection protocols, and no recommendations regarding social distancing. In disbelief of the results, Elenes repeated the survey only to receive the same outcome. One respondent’s employer simply said “Flies can’t get into mouths that are closed,” as though all one had to do to stay safe from the virus was to keep your mouth shut.

Given this response, it’s not so surprising that the precautions recommended by the Center for Disease Control, the ones I follow when leaving my home, are not necessarily being followed by farmworkers. Not receiving any disinfectant, masks, or gloves from their employers, workers have to bring soap from home. While there may be space in the fields for social distancing, housing and transportation for the workers are often crowded and unsanitary (a single housing unit can hold 200 workers or more). There are no federal guidelines, nor space, for quarantining a sick farm worker. What’s more, sick leave is rare and there is limited affordable health care for testing or treatment of any illness for migrant farmworkers, much less COVID-19.

One woman, a migrant worker on a farm in Washington, has seen workers stay home out of fear of catching the virus and to protect their children that have come with them to the U.S. She, on the other hand, had already taken off of work for an injury and cannot afford to take those precautions. She has told her children not to take her to the hospital if she gets sick because her “biggest fear is dying alone there and leaving her family with crushing medical debts.”

Vice President Erik Nicolson of United Farm Workers claims he’s heard of dozens of farm workers testing positive for the virus in Washington state in the last two weeks.

How farm employers and officials respond to the coronavirus could jeopardize the entire U.S. food supply chain. Without enough workers and buyers, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits in WI and OH. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies the majority produce to half the U.S., tractors are plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Farms are suffering alongside every other sector in response to the virus. There isn’t always the labor to harvest, process, and deliver food, due to the border/visa restriction and inadequate health care. The demand isn’t there either. With restaurant, hotels and schools deemed unessential and closing their doors to avoid spreading the virus, their supplying farms are left with a massive surplus and not enough buyers. Even with the spike in sales at grocery stores, it isn’t enough to buy all the produce that was grown for schools and businesses. Farmers are donating some of their surplus to food banks and other such emergency food response organizations. These organizations only have so much refrigerator and storage space to accept farmers produce, even though their assistance is being turned to now more than ever with rapidly soaring rates of unemployment.

Maybe the stockpiling and mad scramble for food that I’m seeing in grocery stores isn’t as unwarranted as I had thought.

I get overwhelmed with the severity and widespread impacts of COVID-19 like everyone else. Clearly, our national food system wasn’t stable enough to withstand such a shock, as we’re seeing is the case with many other systems and sectors. It’s clear that there needs to be a significant shift in how our food systems function in order to get through this health crisis. This means connecting local farmers directly to nearby communities and individuals in need of food, preserving and supporting our regional ecosystems and networks, and using emergency planning to make these channels socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable and resilient in the face of future challenges.

How many miles are you willing to walk to flee hunger? For some Venezuelans, escaping the country’s food shortages and poverty has meant walking hundreds, even thousands, of miles. 

Many Venezuelans have sought refuge in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, or Chile, often by foot. Some have walked 5,000 miles to reach Argentina. They are known as “los caminantes”- the walkers. These are people who are too poor to afford a bus ticket to neighboring countries. They walk 1000s of miles to reach big cities where there are more job opportunities or they have family members in farther countries. 

I have seen this firsthand. On a bus I rode from Cuenca to La Troncal, Ecuador, a Venezuelan refugee entered to sell chocolates. With each sale, he includes a Bolivar, the Venezuelan currency, as a souvenir. Hyperinflation has made the Venezuelan currency worthless, yet refugees have given it value by making it a souvenir. As he goes up and down the aisle, he explains he was an engineer back in Caracas. His paycheck no longer covered basic necessities, so he fled his country. Now, his only wish is to make enough money to send to the family he left behind. This man is just one of the five million Venezuelans who have fled their country in the past 6 years. 

Grafitti in Ecuador depicting President Maduro as a donkey along with the words “Venezuela your only hope is God.” As well as two migrants, one of them an engineer and the other carries a bag with objects that remind him of his family.

But the long history of outmigration from Venezuela has now changed. The response to COVID-19 in Ecuador, Colombia, and other countries is forcing Venezuelan refugees to return to a country that was already broken before the pandemic. With a fragile health system and inadequate access to food, the arrival of the coronavirus promises to leave devastating effects in Venezuela. While the country is rich in oil, its infrastructure and government are weak and will not be able to save it from the pandemic. To understand the challenges the country will face, it’s important to understand what led to the mass migration of millions of Venezuelans.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, and the country’s economy is highly dependent on them. Oil revenues made the country one of the richest nations in Latin America from 1958 through the 1990s. During Venezuela’s economic boom, the revenue received allowed former president Chavez to increase spending and borrowing. Yet Chavez did not invest those funds in public infrastructure or economic diversification. When oil prices dropped by 70% in 2014, the economy collapsed. The coronavirus pandemic led to an unprecedented demand for oil dropping the value of oil, which will only worsen Venezuela’s economy. This is a perfect example of the ‘resource curse’, in which countries that are rich in natural resources, often in minerals and oil, have greater levels of poverty, inequality, and corruption. The country’s path to instability was further worsened by political corruption, international sanctions, and overspending. The inability of the government to address these issues has led to hyperinflation, hunger, violence, and a mass migration of people from the country. 

Despite the economic crisis, Venezuela’s current leader, President Nicolás Maduro, has continued an ambitious Housing Mission to build at least 5 million homes by 2025. Yet, even such an ambitious program is hardly enough to meet Venezuelan’s basic needs. One Venezuelan refugee who received one of the homes expressed resentment towards the President’s plan:  “Qué importa si nos dan una casa, si no tenemos nada de comer” — “What does it matter if they give us a house, if we don’t have anything to eat.” 

Prior to COVID-19, finding food in Venezuela had already been an arduous task. A recent study by the United Nations World Food Program found that one in three Venezuelans do not get enough food. Many of them involuntarily engage in “The Maduro Diet,” named after President Nicolás Maduro, which mainly consists of root vegetables and beans. 

Empty supermarket shelves, long lines for basic goods, and an accelerating inflation have led many to turn to violence to find food — and this was all before COVID-19. Young boys joined gangs to scavenge for food scraps. In Chacao, a neighborhood in Caracas, children in gangs used machetes, knives, slingshots, and broken glass to fight other gang groups over food found in restaurant’s garbage. In the city of Macay, thieves stole two horses from a veterinary school and slaughtered them for their meat. Others targeted food trucks. Such desperate acts of food looting have become common events in Venezuela even before the pandemic. 

Things have only gotten worse. On March 16th, President Maduro issued a national quarantine. Since then, security forces have stopped vehicles, including food trucks, from passing state borders in an effort to halt the spread of the virus. The virus is also testing the crumbling healthcare sector of the country, where many hospitals already lack running water, soap, medications, and masks, many of the essential materials needed to combat the disease. In an NPR interview, Dr. Julio Castro, based at the Central University in Caracas, reported that “Sixty-six percent of the biggest hospitals in Venezuela do not have running water. They just receive water once or twice a week. They don’t have water, and they don’t have soap either.” The lack of the most basic resources will most definitely strain medical professional’s ability to care for COVID-19 patients. 

In Latin American countries, national lockdowns have put many Venezuelan refugees out of jobs, leaving many of them without money to buy food or pay rent. The governments in the countries they have sought refuge in have failed at providing any support to Venezuelans. Without anyone to protect them, many Venezuelan refugees are being forcibly evicted from their homes because they are unable to pay rent. With no other option left, many are returning to Venezuela. 

On Twitter, President Nicolás Maduro has acted “nobly” in welcoming back returnees “We’re looking out for our compatriots who are victims of xenophobia and have decided to return to Venezuela, their homeland. Here we open our arms to them as we have done with millions of people who have found in our country a land of peace & hope. Welcome!” While his words seem reassuring, the reality of hunger, inadequate hospitals, and poverty, that already existed, but will only be made worse by COVID-19, is a dark threat that looms in the future of many of the thousands of returnees.

Screenshot of Nicolás Maduro’s tweet on April 5th, 2020

On National TV, President Maduro announced his plan to test each returnee for COVID-19, stating that if they test positive, they will remain at the border until they are healthy. But in Tachira, a bordering state with Colombia, unsafe conditions in the facilities housing returnees have been reported. Everyone arriving at the border, sick or not, is being forced into abandoned buildings where they must share a dirty room, with no beds, with 10 to 20 people. Many are without food, water, and sanitary bathrooms. Instead of being welcomed with the appropriate care, returnees are faced with a high probability of catching the virus due to the crowded and unsanitary living conditions. 

COVID-19 promises to deepen the Venezuelan crisis. And the road to recovery does not seem likely to start anytime soon. Major governmental and economic reforms to diversify the country’s economy need to occur to relieve Venezuela’s financial crisis. A good start would be removing President Maduro, who has governed without transparency for the past 7 years. Media outlets are state-run, so reporting on the cases of COVID-19 has been limited and inaccurate. As of April 29, 2020, the number of confirmed cases in Colombia is 5,949 and in Ecuador the number is 24,258. Yet, only 329 cases have been reported in Venezuela, which may be far from the truth given the media’s history of misrepresentation of information, inadequate healthcare, and inability to run COVID-19 tests.

Even in the United States, where resources are more abundant, hospitals are still overrun with COVID-19 patients and many supermarket shelves are empty. The pandemic has exposed the United States’ fragile infrastructure. But how can the Venezuelan government provide food or medical assistance during the pandemic when it didn’t have any to begin with? While these are uncertain times, one thing remains clear: No amount of oil can help feed the people of Venezuela.