FOOD/HEALTH/ MIGRATION
Red, White and Black to Red, White and Blue
When brainstorming topics in food, health and migration for this project, I thought back to my experience growing up in the United States as an immigrant from Egypt and what that meant for my health. As the daughter of a single mother, I had to be adaptable with regard to the food I was given. Sometimes, my mother would be running late on her way to work and would give me a couple of dollars to get food from the bodega by my elementary school. I remember having to choose the biggest snacks so I would not be hungry during class.
I also remember walking into the bodega by my school and being captivated by all of the bright, metallic packages of the chips, candy and baked goods. A bodega is a small grocery store that typically serves lower income, minority communities with cheap, typically processed, food products. In a bodega, I was always more drawn to the bright red Doritos bags than to most of the other snacks in the store and would always get a few bags to snack on in school. This personal anecdote is one that many first generation immigrants can relate to as relying on cheap, ready to eat food for your family is necessary when your work week inhibits you from preparing food. It occurred to me that there was a reason these foods were so appealing to me as opposed to the semi-prepared products bodegas carry. Aside from the practicality of purchasing a ready to eat food product, the appearance of a Doritos package would seemingly increase my appetite.
The topic of color association to food marketing is one that has been heavily researched with regard to fast food advertising, but has scarcely been studied with regard to processed snack food packaging. This topic is not only important to me, as an immigrant woman of color who has a historical relationship to processed snack foods from her youth, but it is important to a community like that of the Bronx because of the lack of research done on processed snack food marketing, let alone its impact on lower socioeconomic communities. The Bronx community has historically been plagued with poor health care services, a severe lack of sources of nutritious food and exploitative research practices that do not have a direct positive impact to the communities researched. This can be attributed to the extremely high minority immigrant population of the borough, which has the lowest socioeconomic status of all of New York City (Venugopal).
Based off of my background and the lack of research done in the Bronx immigrant community on the topic of color association, I decided that the question I want to explore for my research is what colors do immigrants in the Bronx associate with processed snack foods and why?