2.5: Conclusion

While the immigrants and refugees I met while selling at farmers markets, growing vegetables in community gardens, and working in Anchorage’s restaurant industry have carved out a niche for themselves in Anchorage, they remain on the peripheries of dominant definitions of the “local food” movement. For them, “local food” is not just something that is grown in Alaska, or “of Alaska” as Nattat described. Rather, it is transformed as it moves between places called home or here, where immigrants and refugees find opportunities to bring familiar flavors, produce, and practices from their home countries to Alaska. However, these familiar and unfamiliar practices further illuminate the invisible barriers by which the “local food” movement further ostracizes the translocal nature of how these immigrants and refugees create their own local food systems. Despite providing the labor that grows these local foods, immigrants and refugee farmers continue to exist just outside the borders of alternative food practices by providing labor and vegetables to fill a whiter and wealthier demographic’s table. These local food spaces do not resonate with their food needs and  result in their having to obtain multiple garden plots to grow “food from here” for white customers at the market and “food from home” for their own families. These farmers earn an income from farmers markets but are doubly burdened with expending labor in local food spaces while facing barriers to inclusion in a local food system. These limiting factors of spatial proximity disproportionately favor family farms, which own the majority of agricultural land, and exclude refugee and immigrant farmers expending their energies and land resources to feed a local food movement that does not accept their own practices and vegetables as part of that system.

This chapter has offered insight into the lives of a few immigrants and refugees living in Anchorage, Alaska, and their understandings of the dynamic definition of “local food.”  These narratives are personal and relatable in that they describe the complexities of how immigrants and refugees make sense of their new places of settlement through food practices and food choices. Thus, they reveal the importance of access to culturally important foods. By rooting my analysis of local foods in these narratives, I show the importance of understanding the multiple layers of local foods that are applied in home countries, in Anchorage, Alaska, in farmers markets, and in homes. I call for greater attention to those who remain at the peripheries of these dominant food movements in the United States and how these movements continue to foster exclusions regarding what it means to be “local.” Alongside many of my fellow chapter authors in this volume, my recommendation is not for a new definition of “local” but rather for more attention to how immigrants and refugees are carving out spaces of familiarity by connecting home countries and countries of settlement through the multiple meanings of food that can extend translocal foodscapes into “local food” systems. Through a more attentive perspective of what “local food” means, policymakers, scholars, and food movement participants may be able to foster greater opportunities for these populations that recognize that “local foods” can exist as “food from home” and “food from here.”

Notes

1. The names of all persons and organizations have been changed.

2. I utilize “local” in opposition to the mainstream definition of local foods as foods within a specific geographic distance.

3. As illustrated by Pollan (2008), Nestle (2013), Berry (2010), and Lappe (2010).