Revealing refugee food cultures and building a new foodscape
The objective of the project is to develop a process where refugee groups can represent their food cultures as step toward developing food sovereignty.
The visual: a table cloth as record of a collaborative process.
The situation:
Too often the refugees are the subjects of well-meaning efforts to do things for them – community gardens, nutrition education – but they already have had to develop effective strategies for sustenance. To begin with, they have a rich food culture from their home countries, then they have had to adapt to many years of living in camps supplementing the UN food provisions in innovative ways such as growing food in salvaged buckets. Resettled now in Syracuse, NY, they forage plants rich in nutrient value from vacant lots, parks, and brownfield sites.
The process
This project worked with refugees in a collaborative process to represent their food cultures as part of the planning and design of a refugee farm at the urban edge. In a discussion early in the process one woman from the Congo stated, “we have to eat your food but you don’t have to eat ours.” From that we all decided to develop a process of sharing food and knowledge with a common meal .
The table
The central metaphor as well as material element in the process became a common table. Two “food events” brought together various refugee groups and organizations that work with them around a table. Before the meal the refugees took photographs of their own common daily meals – where they shopped, the process of preparing and cooking the food, and the space and people they ate with. Then for the common meal tables were covered with white paper and the photographs where taped on top along with the food. During the meal recipes, stories, questions, and notes were written directly on the table.
The network
The table and the processes around it provided the means for revealing the food cultures, linking the other components of their food system, and building a new foodscape – markets, the home, community gardens, and the new refugee farm.