How did cooking help eight forced migrant women in South Africa create a sense of home?

Details

The article drew on Food for Change, an online recipe-sharing project, to explore belonging amid anti-migrant hostility and exclusion during the pandemic. Its analysis focused on the physical pleasure of eating and the connections food fostered with other people, places of origin and South Africa.

The women combined cooking knowledge from their home countries with ideas from other cuisines. They adapted local ingredients and techniques to make meals that felt ‘exactly like home’. The article describes how this creativity united households around shared enjoyment of food and softened the effects of hostile anti-migrant messages outside the home on everyday life inside it.

The finding concerns belonging within these households, not the removal of discrimination in wider society. It is an interpretation of a small, specific project; the abstract does not report a comparison group or a measured estimate of how much cooking changed participants’ sense of belonging.