The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia by Dr. Sukhmani Khorana

Author:Dr. Sukhmani Khorana [Khorana, Sukhmani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Cooking, History, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781786602206
Google: oOPaDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2018-03-13T04:27:05+00:00

Tackling Food Insecurity, Building Community: Food Justice Truck (Melbourne)

Existing research on food and refugees in Australia emphasises the need to address the high rate of food insecurity, as well as to make links between food in old and new homes. In her work on the role of food in regional refugee settlement in Coffs Harbour, Hughes (2015, 61–62) refers to this as the ‘food sovereignty’ approach, which she explains thus:

Food represents a complex and precarious commodity, it is so much more than meeting nutritional targets… . This is particularly relevant for refugees, who may flee their homeland with little except their stories, their cultural practices and a long history of disempowerment. This is where a food sovereignty approach can be useful because it:

is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. (Viva Campesina, cited in Hughes)

It is in line with such an approach that several community garden projects have been initiated in urban and regional Australia, particularly with a view to facilitating the nutritional and social needs of humanitarian migrants. One such project is currently taking place with the African community settled in Footscray in Melbourne’s west, and will be studied in detail by food researcher Isabelle de Solier (Victoria University 2015). There is preliminary research on a community garden established for African refugees in Logan in south-east Queensland. According to Neil Harris et al. (2014), ‘This food garden has the highest refugee involvement of any community garden in Queensland, with 35 families working individual plots’. It has received recognition from the Refugee Council of Australia for promoting the settlement, self-sufficiency and participation of newly arrived humanitarian entrants and has also been identified as important for intercultural activity (9205). It has been suggested that the physicality of the garden is important for migrants who might be renting and has the added benefit of providing biographical continuity if they were involved with agricultural activities in their countries of origin (9208). In a similar vein, Hughes’s (2015) research on refugees from Myanmar settled in the regional community of Coffs Harbour indicates that home or community gardens enable users to ‘grow culturally significant or otherwise rare foods unavailable in mainstream shops’. She adds that growing one’s own food allows culinary traditions to continue, and ‘this can be an essential part of maintaining a sense of identity in the resettlement process’ (72). While these programmes are proving to be beneficial, they may be restricted in terms of availability of land and the sheer number of refugees and ex-refugees in temporary housing.

My own research on the Food Justice Truck (FJT) program, based in the city of Melbourne, reveals a comparable two-pronged approach to tackling the food-oriented issues faced by humanitarian migrants (including those awaiting decisions on their claims) living in the community. To find out more about FJT, which defines itself as a social enterprise initiative by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, I conducted an extended interview with its manager, Russell Shields.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.