Learning to eat the “right” way: examining nutrition socialization from the perspective of immigrants and refugees

ABSTRACT

Existing studies suggests that immigrants’ dietary quality often declines over time after they move to the U.S., despite public and private efforts to provide immigrants and refugees to the U.S. with nutritional resources. Drawing on two interview-based studies with immigrants (n = 30) and refugees (n = 8) in North Carolina, we find that these immigrant/refugee communities often have healthy food traditions from their home countries that they want to maintain, but they lack guidance about how to navigate the U.S. food system in order to do so. Our findings question the notion that “good nutrition” is a universal concept; we argue that by focusing solely on the nutritional components of food, rather than approaching dietary behavior holistically, service providers exacerbate the challenges that immigrants and refugees face in continuing healthy food traditions in the U.S. Our analyzes extend previous research on food socialization by specifically examining the nutrition socialization process of immigrant and refugees, furthering our understanding of how and why immigrants’ diets change over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Nutrition socialization
• healthy immigrant effect
• nutrition education
• immigrant and refugee health
• dietary acculturation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For more information on study participants, see Table A.

2. Participants from this study are indicated by USDA in Table A.

3. Participants from this study are indicated by I/R in Table A.

4. Source: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/overview-us-refugee-law-and-policy.

5. Some participants did have their own gardens or participate in community gardens while living in the United States. This provided important resources for some, but gardens were unable to provide sufficient food resources on a day-to-day basis.

6. Ner Mu specifically mentions reading, “The China study” which was conducted by U.S. nutritional biochemist T. Colin Campbell.

7. Bergeaud-Blackler, Lever, and Fischer (2016).

8. For a more detailed discussion of immigrant women, food insecurity, and motherhood see Carney (2015). A further analysis of gender, food work, and motherhood for the USDA participants is available in Elliott and Bowen (2018) and Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant no. [2011-68001-30103] from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture; NC State University Extension, Engagement, and Economic Development Seed Grant 2014–2015; U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Notes on contributors

Mari Kate Mycek

Mari Kate Mycek is a research associate at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy. Her research interests include food insecurity, community development, carework, and social stratification.

Annie Hardison-Moody

Annie Hardison-Moody is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Human Sciences at NC State University, where her work focuses on the intersections of religion, gender, and health. She is the author of When Religion Matters: Practicing Healing in the Aftermath of the Liberian Civil War (Wipf & Stock) and co-editor of Parenting Practice as Source for Theology: Mothering Matters (Palgrave).

J. Dara Bloom

J. Dara Bloom is an assistant professor and Local Foods Extension Specialist at NC State University. Her current work includes providing training to Cooperative Extension agents about developing community-based local food projects that integrate low-resource consumers. She is also involved with several research projects that explore how to strengthen immigrant/refugee communities’ capacity to participate in local food production and preparation; how to connect food pantries with local food sources; how to build relationships between local farmers and childcare centers; and how to understand farmer motivations for selling to low-resource consumers.

Sarah Bowen

Sarah Bowen is associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. Her work focuses on the relationships between food systems, social institutions, and inequality. She has conducted research in the U.S. South and in France, Mexico, and Sweden. She is the author of numerous articles, as well as two books: Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (University of California Press, 2015) and Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Sinikka Elliott

Sinikka Elliott is associate professor of sociology at The University of British Columbia. Her publications in venues such as American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Journal of Family Issues have analyzed family processes and power dynamics, the ways families reproduce, resist, and reconfigure gender, racial, class, and sexual inequalities, and the diverse experiences of motherhood. She is the author of Not My Kid: What Parents Believe About the Sex Lives of their Teenagers published in 2012 with NYU Press and coauthor of Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It published in 2019 with Oxford University Press.