October 21, 2005

NDSU Grant to Help New Americans Improve Food Handling Practices

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded the North Dakota State University Extension Service a $569,000 grant to study food handling practices among refugees and new Americans and create educational materials in several languages.

Julie Garden-Robinson, NDSU Extension Service food and nutrition specialist, and Kathleen Slobin, chair of the NDSU Sociology and Anthropology Department, are the project’s directors. They’ve formed a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team of NDSU research and Extension Service faculty and collaborators from the University of Minnesota, a tribal college and public health agencies to work on the project.

Team members will interview new Americans from several cultural groups to learn about their customary diets and food safety practices.

“We want to find out how cultural knowledge about food handling is disrupted and/or changed through the immigrant experience involving cultural transitions and new living conditions,” Slobin says. “Then we will be able to use culturally sensitive methods to teach safe food practices for life in the United States.”

The team’s primary goals during the three-year project are to:

• Assess how refugees and new Americans handle food through interviews with them and the professionals who serve them
• Develop and adapt food safety material to fit the refugees and new Americans’ needs, and make the material available in several languages, including Kurdish, Bosnian, Somali, Liberian, Arabic and English, and in several formats, such as CD, DVD and print
• Train health mentors from the new American populations to serve as food safety leaders and help those populations use the material
• Provide food safety education to children and adults in schools and community settings
• Use health inspection reports and interviews with local health inspectors to assess the food receiving, handling and storage practices at ethnic restaurants and markets
• Adapt food safety materials for restaurant and market employees and managers, and provide them with individualized training in proper food handling

The team also will develop a multilingual food safety Web site with all of the materials it creates or adapts, plus links to multilingual food safety resources in other states.

“This project has the potential to be a model program in food safety education for diverse populations, with a Web site that could be used worldwide in food safety education at both the individual and retail level,” Garden-Robinson says.

The U.S Department of Health and Human Services predicts that the nation’s diversity will grow in the next decade, which will challenge health-related educators and providers to reach a wider variety of populations.

The Fargo-Moorhead area is one of the largest refugee resettlement communities per capita in the country. More than 11,000 refugees live there.

Educating people about food safety is important because foodborne illness causes about 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospitalizations and is linked to 76 million illnesses in the U.S. annually, according to Garden-Robinson. A 2004 pilot food safety education study in Fargo indicated refugees and new Americans have many gaps in safe food handling knowledge and practices.

The team plans to use already available material as much as possible to avoid duplication. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, has developed many food safety materials, but few have been adapted for specific populations.

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Source: Julie Garden-Robinson, (701) 231-7187, jgardenr@ndsuext.nodak.edu
Source: Kathleen Slobin, (701) 231-8939, kathleen.slobin@ndsu.edu
Editor: Ellen Crawford, (701) 231-5391, ecrawfor@ndsuext.nodak.edu

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