The intervention gave me valuable insights into my research question about how urban food culture can help migrant adolescents feel connected to both their “home” and new environments.
To start, each participant chose ingredients (cinnamon, jasmine tea, and plums) that reminded them of home. This showed how food carries personal and cultural memories, helping migrant adolescents maintain a connection to their hometowns. Food, for them, is more than just nutrition; it’s also a way to express their identity in a new place.
When participants recreated dishes and flavours from home, they felt emotional comfort, showing how food can help them cope with adaptation challenges. Familiar tastes and cooking habits gave them a sense of stability and emotional support in an unfamiliar environment. This suggests that for migrant adolescents, being able to access or recreate traditional foods may be an important way to feel supported during the adaptation process.
The intervention also showed how participants adapted their hometown recipes by using locally available ingredients. This mix of old and new elements suggests that food can help migrant adolescents engage with their new environment while staying connected to their home culture. By combining flavours from home with new ingredients, they find a way to balance their cultural identities, experiencing both their heritage and the new environment.
Additionally, participants’ search for ingredients in London’s Asian supermarkets and restaurants shows how urban food culture can support exploration and involvement with the new place. For migrant adolescents, visiting food markets and ethnic restaurants can help them feel more comfortable and included. Finding ingredients and places with familiar flavours makes it easier for them to form personal connections in their new city.
Discussions about spices like cinnamon and nutmeg also showed that food can help build cross-cultural understanding. By noticing how spices have similar meanings across different cultures, participants realised they could connect with people from various backgrounds through shared food values and practices. For migrant adolescents, this awareness might help them see their new environment as a place for cultural exchange, where they can keep their traditions and enjoy new cultural practices as well.
The intervention also revealed that food practices allow migrant adolescents to find a balance between home and their new environment, without needing to completely accept or abandon any specific culture. This balance provides emotional resilience, letting them keep parts of their past while embracing aspects of their new life, which can help them manage the stress of adapting.
After reflecting on this intervention, I also see some limitations. While the intervention explored participants’ memories and food symbols from home, it could go further by looking into their food rituals, like family dining traditions. This would provide better insight into how the social side of food impacts adaptation. Also, this intervention provided a one-time view of participants’ experiences, but adaptation is a continuous process. Future research could follow changes in their food relationships, adaptation strategies, and identity development for a deeper view of adaptation.
In conclusion, this intervention suggests that urban food culture can indeed help migrant adolescents connect with both their home and new environment. It provides ways to maintain cultural identity, find emotional support, adapt to new ingredients, build cross-cultural understanding, and balance their identity. This gives new insight into how food can be both a connection and a tool to help migrant adolescents cope with the challenges of migration and cultural adjustment in urban settings.