On a bustling Wednesday, volunteers are packing plastic bags with green peppers, ears of corn, peaches — and ingredients specifically used in Southeast Asian dishes, like water spinach, scallions and ginger. Other days, jasmine rice, bok choy and Japanese eggplant make their way into the bags.
“That’s super popular as well. A lot of people put it in their soups. My parents used to oven roast it and then dress it with scallions, fish sauce and lemons,” said Lisette Le of the eggplant.
Le leads the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development, or VietAID, a Dorchester nonprofit serving a predominantly Vietnamese clientele. The agency launched its food shelf in March 2020, as many locals began to lose their jobs due to COVID-19 restrictions and food insecurity rose significantly.
“We started getting the sense that this would last longer than two weeks, or a month,” said Le.
VietAID got food donations from other organizations to distribute to the community — typical items like canned corn, sliced white bread, lettuce and macaroni and cheese. Volunteers would leave boxes outside to collect any food that was unwanted. They noticed that items like potatoes and tomato sauce were regularly coming back.
The organization asked itself, “did those items make sense to the Vietnamese diet?” Le said. So they started supplementing the bags with ingredients like jasmine rice or vermicelli noodles, staples in a Vietnamese cuisine, bought from local farms and supermarkets. But two years into the program, with the emergency pandemic funds disappearing, the question is looming of where stable funding will come from.
“It’s less of a social service, and more of an exchange”
Outside VietAID’s campus-like building on Charles Street, Ngoc Pham, the group’s food coordinator, handed out bags to seniors as they walked under the awning, no questions asked. They’re distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, while supplies last, with a one-bag-per-household policy to try to reach more families.
Pham said at least 80% of the people who come for the food are Vietnamese. “I connect with a lot of these mothers out there who worry about having food for their children on a day-to-day basis. It resonates with me,” Pham said through an interpreter.
She doesn’t see it as charity work.
“It’s less of a social service, and more of an exchange,” she said. “As people come in to get these bags, I get to learn a lot from them. They share stories about how they can use their produce to cook or teach me new recipes.”
That day, 71-year-old Thuong Nguyen asked for a bag. Through an interpreter, he told GBH News its items were familiar ingredients in Vietnamese cuisine.
“On top of that, they have a lot of nutrients, like vitamins and minerals that as an old person, I would like to have in my body,” he said. Nguyen shared how he would wash the water spinach, pick it apart and make a dish called Rau Muống Xào Tỏi.
“I’m going to lightly boil them just for a few moments so that it gets soft and then take them out,” he said, pausing in between steps. “Then I’m going to fry them, with some oil, garlic and ... anything like salt, sugar or garlic powder. Then I eat it.”
Another local, 75-year-old Nhung Chau, said she’s been getting the bags for a few months, and made a stew with the water spinach, tomatoes and some tofu she had at home.
“The pandemic has definitely had an effect on me,” she said, also through an interpreter. “I’m old, so I don’t work. Getting easy access to food in such a close proximity to where I live is really helpful.”
Keeping cultural sensitivity in food insecurity an urgent issue
Some of the cultural food items were bought with money VietAID acquired through the Boston Resiliency Fund, which dispensed tens of millions of dollars to the city’s nonprofits in the pandemic and gave them some flexibility on what they could purchase. VietAID also received funding through the city’s Office of Food Access.
To get its supplies each week, VietAID works with organizations like Project Restore US and Fair Foods to get produce that’s traditionally distributed in U.S. food pantries, like lettuce and tomatoes. The week GBH News visited VietAID, they had purchased water spinach from World Farmers in Lancaster.
Its partnership with VietAID started in 2020, selling items like bok choy, water spinach and pea tendrils to the organization. World Farmers itself works with many immigrant farmers.
“Our organization, since its inception, is all about providing food security to communities in a way that it’s culturally appropriate because our farmers mirror those communities,” said Maria Moreira, founding executive director of World Farmers.
The organization aggregates farmers’ produce and started selling at local farmer’s markets, including one in Field Corner, more than 20 years ago. The demand for fresh, local, culturally competent produce is high, with farmers selling out.
Henrietta Isaboke, executive director and farmer, said the fact that immigrants are growing food for other immigrants helps with cultural appropriateness in the food being sold. For instance, she said, some cultures consider lettuce “rabbit food.”
“It’s really important to highlight how having these traditional crops that are traditional to the communities that we are serving is. It's a major game changer,” she said.
But as they wait for the growing season to begin again, VietAID organizers are focused on getting culturally appropriate dry goods into their distribution.
“Right now, it’s less of a produce approach, and more pantry items that serve a longer purpose,” said Nhan Truong, community engagement coordinator at VietAID.
For dry goods, they’re relying on other nonprofits to direct them to the best places to buy low-cost soy sauce, sardines, vermicelli and other long-lasting but culturally relevant ingredients.
But Le’s worried about where money will come from. Pandemic relief money and food access funds have been reduced significantly in the past year, she said.
“Going into 2022, it’s unclear what the funding sources are going to be to sustain it, and it’s a big question all around food insecurity,” she said.
The answer could lie with Boston’s new mayor.
During her campaign, Michelle Wu supported a food justice platform, which she said meant that people have “consistent access to nutritious, affordable, and culturally relevant food.” That, she said, is a “universal human right.”
Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, said last year in her food justice platform that the city should employ business development tools and technical assistance to help small food retailers to survive and provide culturally relevant food to their communities.
Despite the question of where funding will come from, VietAID is expand and launch an emergency gift card program in the new year, giving clients cards that can be used at local supermarkets and Asian grocery stores.
“That’s kind of our goal for 2022,” Truong said.
