Seas of Lemongrass: A Political Ecology Perspective on Urban Agriculture and Immigrant Food Security in the Twin Cities, Minnesota

Urban agriculture (UA) frequently employs organic, polycultural and agroecological techniques in order to farm suboptimal urban land with limited resources. However, less scholarly attention has been paid to its actual impacts on the eating patterns of marginalized groups like immigrants, which is important to study for political debates about the expansion and purpose of UA. In this study, I examined how different forms of UA affect food security and dietary diversity for immigrants in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Using dietary surveys, food access questionnaires, and informal conversations, I determined that a simplistic definition of food security focused only on overall dietary diversity, caloric intake, and basic food access fails to reveal differences in these outcomes between UA and the control. However, a multidimensional approach shows that UA helps immigrants access crucial micronutrients through fresh vegetables and can increase immigrant agency in the food system by allowing people to plant or eat culturally relevant crops and preserve their traditional food cultures. While this agency effect is stronger for community gardens, there is a tradeoff with availability here as farm stands can provide a wider variety of vegetables. Overall, this analysis shows significant potential for UA to substantially increase food security with increased land access, season extension, and by providing additional food groups, but this would require careful attention to place-specific dynamics, such as pressure from more profitable land uses in a booming metropolitan area, Minnesota’s harsh winters, and the unique mixtures of immigrants and cultures in a region.