Get Involved|May: Food is Culture
“The magic of food is that it’s a really accessible way to initiate deeper conversations about culture.”
– Lucas Sin, Hong Kong Chef and Food Blogger
This story is part of The Meaning of Food, Northwest Harvest’s yearlong exploration of food’s meaning in our lives and communities.
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For millennia, communities worldwide have created powerful traditions around growing, cooking, and sharing food. Food connects groups across geography and time, with many ethnic communities expressing and preserving their identity through their cuisine – from ingredients and farming practices to preparation methods.
Food culture encompasses our beliefs, attitudes, and practices related to producing and consuming food. Because food is deeply intertwined with our heritage and ethnicity, traditional dishes nourish our connection to cultural identity.
Food often marks important life milestones: births, coming-of-age ceremonies, marriages, and deaths. We use food to celebrate joyous occasions and find comfort during times of mourning. While some dishes change with seasons or availability, others remain constant through generations, connecting us to ancestors we never met.
Cultural holidays frequently feature foods with rich symbolic meaning. Take New Year celebrations around the world:
Food culture isn’t just about what we eat, but how it’s produced. Religious and cultural guidelines often govern food preparation:
Halal food follows Islamic guidelines regarding not just ingredients (avoiding pork and alcohol) but also processing methods, ensuring food remains pure and uncontaminated. People raising livestock for halal meat must follow guidelines that prioritize the dignity and welfare of the animals and adhere to ethical slaughtering methods that minimize pain and stress.
Kosher foods follow Jewish dietary laws. The Hebrew word kashrut means “ritual suitability” and these laws dictate how to prepare, store, and eat food, including how to slaughter animals that are permitted for consumption.
Having access to culturally appropriate foods, grown and processed according to tradition, helps people maintain their identity regardless of where they live.
Food plays a crucial role in preserving cultural traditions, practices, knowledge, and memories. The dishes from our childhood often bring comfort and nostalgia as we age. Recipes passed down from grandparents become the meals we prepare for our own children.
To some extent, food culture travels with us. When immigrants or refugees arrive in new countries, recipes are often among their most treasured possessions.
Food can also map histories of struggle and resilience. The transatlantic slave trade profoundly impacted food traditions: many enslaved African women braided rice or other grains into their hair or their children’s hair during the Middle Passage to ensure they would have food for the journey. Later, ingredients like okra and rice became essential to Southern American cuisine like gumbo.
Food connects us to home, even when home exists in multiple places.
For Jonna Rosario Babauta, Volunteer Program Supervisor, her dad’s specialty is breakfast for dinner – complete with waffles, spam, rice, fried eggs, and mango. Jonna and her husband continue this tradition with their own children now. She continues saying:
“These foods aren’t traditional to our culture. What is traditional are the people cooking. Because of colonization and assimilation, CHamoru people (indigenous inhabitants of the Mariana Islands and Guam) adapted and grew to love nontraditional foods like spam, rice, and eggs. What has stayed consistent through cooking together is the value of family, and it is a time we practice speaking the CHamoru language through songs and kitchen talk. Life is simple and kinder in these moments.”
Marria Nguyen, Equity and Inclusion Program Manager, describes how egg rolls became a bridge between her Vietnamese identity and American life:
“As the child of immigrants, I have spent my life walking that fine line between my Vietnamese identity and my American one. […] My parents risked everything coming to this country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. […] Food is the great connector. Especially in many Asian cultures, it is how love and care is shown and how we venerate the gods and our ancestors. […] Egg rolls, chả giò in Vietnamese, became our way of immersing our family into the community.”
This tradition continues with the next generation, as Marria’s nephew recently delivered egg rolls to neighbors during the celebration of her niece’s first month of life. Read more about Marria’s cultural family tradition.
Laila Al-Agha, Digital Content Manager, has a deep connection to their Palestinian and Venezuelan cultural identity through food:
“Traditionally food is served on huge platters, and everyone – grandparents, children, cousins, neighbors, friends – eats together with their hands. The belief that there is more when we share, and that there is always enough for an extra guest is deeply important to me. I see so much of Palestinian culture in the way we grow, prepare, and share food: there is resourceful self-reliance and caring community. There is resilience, resistance, and vibrancy cooked into the heart of every meal, and that connection is more important to me now than ever.”
Read more about Laila’s personal and cultural relationship to food.
Recognizing the importance of cultural foods, Rubi Pimentel, Procurement Lead, ensures their food banks prioritize ingredients familiar to the communities they serve.
“When I was a kid visiting food banks with my mother, I remember going home with ingredients she didn’t know how to use. I try to keep that memory close when purchasing inventory. It makes a world of difference when you can access foods that feel like home.”
Whether shaped by geography, immigration, history, or family traditions, food remains a critical component of our cultural identities. The ingredients we grew up with, the dishes featured in our celebrations, and the stories behind our family recipes all highlight the profound role food plays in expressing who we are.
“Food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It’s not about nutrients and calories. It’s about sharing. It’s about honesty. It’s about identity.” – Louise Fresco, Scientist and Writer
APOYO – [Ellensburg, WA]: Allied People Offering Year-Round Outreach’s (APOYO, which also translates to “support” in Spanish) mission is to empower people by providing vital resources, advocacy, education, and opportunities to build community. They have shared and celebrated the presence, histories, and cultures of im/migrants and Latinx people in Central Washington and beyond since the mid-1990s. APOYO is known for its service as a food pantry and clothing bank where everyone is welcome. They provide nutritious, culturally relevant food, meeting material and cultural needs. They also provide additional comprehensive services: educational workshops, internships for young people, after school youth sports, vaccine and health-screening clinics, translation assistance, youth empowerment programming, and referrals to other resources.
Our friends at APOYO have recently shared some of the realities many food pantry partners are experiencing with looming budget cuts:
“Most of our funding comes from WSDA food assistance grants and programs. The State of Washington is facing a $12 billion – $15 billion shortfall. This means that WSDA food assistance funding is being cut radically. While we will continue to seek support from WSDA grants and programs, we know that we are going to be able to serve only a small percentage of the households we have in the past, most especially because We Feed WA is sunsetting. We expect to serve somewhere from 15% to 25% at most. We are using our remaining FY25 EFAP funding to buy dry and canned goods that we can store to distribute over the next few months. We are organizing an APOYO community gardens project with support from three growers. We are also working with backyard gardeners who will donate produce. We see this as an opportunity to foster development of solidarity among community members and will try to emphasize the importance of this as an educational project.”
Alimentando al Pueblo – [Burien, WA]: Alimentando al Pueblo, which translates to “feeding the people,” started in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when Roxana Pardo Garcia, Executive Director and founding member of Alimentando al Pueblo, overheard her aunt saying that she needed access to food but was hesitant to go to food banks, because oftentimes they wouldn’t give her food that she was familiar with. Roxana wondered “why isn’t there a food bank that gives people the food that they eat?”
In response to this question, Alimentando al Pueblo was launched in July 2020, bringing culturally relevant foods to the Latinx Community in Burien, Des Moines, Normandy Park, SeaTac, and White Center. They stocked boxes that contained staple ingredients used by their communities: a box with food used regularly in Mexican cuisine, and a box with food commonly used in Central American countries. Foods included rice, beans, masa, flour, oil, sugar, spices, dried chilis, coffee, oatmeal, tortillas, tomato puree, sweetened and condensed milk, yuca, plantain, and other produce that is sourced seasonally from Latino-owned Mariposa Farm. “Nothing like this exists in the country,” said Roxana, “but what we’re doing is nothing new, it’s an ancestral practice – to feed each other and take care of each other.” Read more about Alimentando al Pueblo.
United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance Washington (UTOPIA Washington) – [Kent, WA]: The UTOPIA Makeki (a hub for UTOPIA’s food distribution efforts) acts as a vibrant community hub, fostering connections and empowering communities. The Makeki Village Market emphasizes affordability and nutrition, with a focus on cultural revitalization and decolonization, celebrating and preserving cultural heritage through food. UTOPIA Makeki aims to bridge generational gaps, reclaim cultural narratives, and makes available many traditional and familiar foods for Pacific Islanders and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.
One family who visits the market each week makes the drive up from Tacoma because UTOPIA Makeki doesn’t limit the amount of food they can take. This family of eight, all living together, faces barriers accessing enough food to keep everyone fed throughout the week. The family shared that this food also helps them financially by allowing them to prioritize paying bills and paying for other necessities without going hungry.
Whether shaped by geography, immigration, history, or family traditions, food remains at the heart of our cultural identities. What foods best represent your culture?
Share your Food is Culture story:
Follow along at @NWHarvest on Instagram and Facebook, and join the conversation using #MeaningOfFood. Together, we’re weaving a deeper understanding of food’s role in creating a more equitable future.
