On a mild January afternoon, Mariam Mohammed maneuvered a small, brightly colored truck – a mobile food pantry - into the parking lot of the Gateway apartment complex on the south side of Fort Morgan, Colo. She parked near the mailboxes and hopped out of the cab to greet the dozen or so high school kids who rushed up to meet her and immediately got to work setting up folding tables and opening compartments in the side of the truck, where dry goods were stored on one side, fresh produce on the other.
“I’ll come around and tell you how many to put in a bag,” Mohammed directed them, as they started filling plastic bags with staples like rice, beans, pasta and fruit at a pace that can only be described as frantic. They felt pressure to work quickly: a long line of people waiting to receive the food was already forming on the sidewalk.
Some of the women in line wore sandals and hijabs. One of them, Haretho Omar, was wrapped in red floral fabric that covered her head and neck. Omar moved to Fort Morgan about 12 years ago, immigrating from Somalia by way of a refugee camp in Kenya, where she ended up after fleeing the civil war in her home country.
Omar, and several other East African immigrants were drawn to this monthly mobile food pantry because it’s the first one in Fort Morgan that caters specifically to the region’s sizable community of East African immigrants. Most, like Omar, are Somali refugees who immigrated over the past 15 years to work at the big meatpacking plant in town.
The Colorado Health Institute’s recently released Colorado Health Access Survey found significantly higher rates of food insecurity in agricultural communities, and among people of color who don’t speak English. Fort Morgan’s many East African immigrants fit both bills and this food pantry was designed to address that need.
In addition to the standard bags of food, the East Africans who patronize Mohammed’s pantry walk away with packages of Somali basics, including tea, spices, custard and, boxes of sweet, dried dates, which according to Mohammed, who is a Somali immigrant herself, are the most popular item she offers.
“It's a staple in every Somali household,” she said. “It's really good. You can make juice out of it. You can eat it by itself. And it's really healthy.”
Mohammed greeted Omar with a clipboard and asked her some questions in their shared native language. Then she turned to her volunteers for help.
“Guys! two sets for her, please,” she called.
As the teenagers rushed to bring over the food, Mohammed added one more item to the order “And one of the Somali bags!”
The road to serving an immigrant community
Mohammed works for Kids At Their Best, a local nonprofit that tackles food insecurity on Colorado’s eastern plains. Executive Director Jodi Walker launched this free East African food pantry last spring, after several years of unsuccessful attempts to reach the Fort Morgan Somali community through their general mobile food pantry services.
“One time we got a really good deal on Velveeta,” Walker recalled about those earlier days. “And I’m like, this is great. I will get Velveeta and everybody can have mac and cheese.”
An East African student she employed had never heard of Velveeta and asked about this strange foodstuff they were offering.
“And I said, ‘Oh, that’s cheese.’ And she looked at me and she’s like, ‘Jodi, this is not cheese,’” Walker said.
The lightbulb turned on for Walker then: If she wanted to serve the local Somali community, she had to offer food that was culturally relevant to them.
“If you’re going to a food pantry, you want food that you’re going to prepare for your regular diet,” she said.
Knowing she was completely out of her depth when it came to the culinary needs of the hundreds of East African immigrants in Fort Morgan, she hired Mohammed to design and run the specialty pantry.
The meaning of culturally relevant foods
Elizabeth Onyango, an associate professor at the school of public health at the University of Alberta who studies food security in immigrant communities, said it’s vitally important for food pantries serving diverse communities to provide culturally relevant food for reasons that go well beyond mere nutrition.
“When we talk about cultural foods, this forms part of our identity as a community, as a group, as an individual,” Onyango said. “It allows for integration of new immigrants. It is an important tool for social cohesion. It's an important tool for people to feel some level of identity with a place.”
When immigrants see the foods they recognize and love on store shelves – or at food pantries – it can be a powerful sign that they belong, which is exactly the intent behind the efforts that Mohammed and Walker are making in Fort Morgan.
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Culturally relevant provisioning
Of course, to provide culturally relevant foods in rural Colorado, you have to figure out how to source it.
Before the event in January, Mohammed purchased supplies at the Mini Halal Market, one of the few local stores that stock Somali specialties and foods that conform to Islamic halal dietary restrictions. It’s in a small strip mall west of downtown Fort Morgan.
“I picked this place because I know the stuff they need is going to be right here,” Mohamed said, filling shopping basket after shopping basket with Somali essentials like cumin seeds, honey, a Somali brand of tuna fish and two types of dates.
“I just look for what is in my household because I know that's what everybody in the Somali household has.”
Mohammed knows that her fellow East African immigrants won't visit a pantry offering unfamiliar foods that might not be halal.
“As Somalis, we're Muslim. There are certain foods that we can’t eat, like pork, anything with gelatin, stuff like that,” she said. “So, when I say they go for what they're familiar with, it's because they know it doesn't have those products in it.”
She has a monthly budget of $600 to purchase special foods – enough to provision about 50 Somali households.
"I do it just to make them feel comfortable,” she said.
A little taste of home
Late in the afternoon, after the first rush of food pantry clientele dies down, a dark minivan drives into the parking lot. Mohamed Haraf Adem, who left Somalia 7 years ago and settled in Fort Morgan, is behind the wheel. He works at the meatpacking plant while his wife stays home with their 5 young children.
Adem said he first came to the food pantry on Mohammed’s personal invitation and said he would be hesitant to take food from people outside the Somali community.
“Because in America, sometimes the food here has pork,” he said, explaining that since he doesn’t always know which foods are halal and which are not, he prefers to stick to the foods he already knows are acceptable.
He said it was his second time visiting the East African food pantry, and he would keep coming back, because he liked all groceries that gave him a little taste of home, including one item in particular:
“The dates,” he said, smiling broadly. “Yeah, that's good.”
