São Paulo – Food can play a crucial role in helping Syrian refugees living in São Paulo reclaim their identity. That’s one of the findings of a research conducted by the University of São Paulo (USP) titled “Representations of Syrian food by Syrian refugees in the city of São Paulo, Brazil: An Ethnographic Study”, published in the beginning of October by science magazine Appetite, which posted an overview online in its website.
“Food is life and life can be studied through food,” said Nutrition professor at USP and author of the study, Fernanda Scagliusi. According to her, the paper shows the importance of food in the life of Syrian refugees, revealing the different socio-cultural roles played by food in their lives, the reclaiming of their identity and livelihood.
This is the first of four papers set to be published, the other three with no target date yet, on food and Syrian refugees in São Paulo. Also authoring the study are nutritionist Fernanda Porreca, the PhDs in Nutrition and Public Health Mariana Ulian and Priscila Sato and anthropologist Ramiro Unsain.
The study discusses the acculturation processes and how food reflects on them, and Scagliusi says that food is a code that permeates our lives, a type of lens to think about the world. “We can say that the civil war in Syria is the largest humanitarian crisis of our times, and we chose to talk about Syrian refugees in São Paulo because, in the last couple of months, we heard many times on the news about the large number of Syrians coming here; we know it took them a long time to get here due to the distance, and that the conflict had to escalate for them to come here,” said Scagliusi.
According to the research, food brings the reclaiming of identity for people that were abruptly displaced and lost their North, since they’re not living in their home country anymore, don’t work in their career fields, don’t speak their languages in the streets.
“We noticed that many of the refugees are working with food; many of them have degrees, they are engineers, doctors, executives, businesspeople, but couldn’t find an opportunity to work in their fields here and found in the Syrian food a way for their livelihood,” said the professor. She assesses that the difficulties in the process of revalidating degrees for refugees also is an aggravating factor in this situation.
A great care for food
The research reveals that the care demonstrated by the refugees with food is impressive, points out the importance of finding the original recipe and the frustration when not getting the desirable results. “We interviewed a young man that used to work in a bakery in Syria and that devoted years of his life making breads, and he told us that what we call here Syrian bread can’t be compared with the original. He’s trying to bake the original Syrian bread, but with no success, since the ingredients here are different and, thus, interfere with the taste, the texture, everything,” said Scagliusi.
Another example is the Syrian ice-cream, a mixture of milk, whipping cream, sugar, rose water and pistachio. According to the professor, it’s a very heavy manual work, requiring a lot of strength and long hours, sometimes days to prepare. “The ice-cream is so symbolic in Syria that presidents of many visiting countries used to go directly to the popular ice cream shop in Damascus to taste the delicacy,” she said.
In the study, two interviewees reveal that they used to produce manually the ice-cream, one at home and another in a restaurant. “By hand, it takes days to prepare, too much care, dedication, and their huge efforts to prepare it carries a lot of meaning,” explained Scagliusi. The study also shows a financial effort by the refugees to acquire Syrian ingredients and spices, such as the cardamom and the pistachio, which are expensive in Brazil.
“It’s not only for the taste, habit or tradition, it’s the fact that they are here, in a country with a different language, a different culture, but still having the pleasure of eating the food,” she said. Other examples are the Syrian barbecue, prepared differently and made with different meats, such as lamb meat, very appreciated in the Syrian culture, and many types of kibbe prepared on the grill.
In addition to food, other important factors revealed by the refugees are the place where they used to barbecue, how their house, the ice cream shop used to be; they also mentioned fruits that they can’t find here, such as the janerek, which reminds of a little green-skin avocado; the bitter-tasting greens, broad beans, which they also can’t find here, and that they miss. According to Scagliusi, there’s a whole range of Syrian foods that can’t be found here in Brazil.
Food and resistance
“We noticed a very deep connection with food from back home, as a way to prevent a potential waning of identity. Because life here is so different, and these people have lost their homes, their relatives, their friends, their workplaces – everything was very abruptly taken from them. They’ve experienced wars, bombings, even prison,” explained Scagliusi.
Food, according to the study, translates what Syrians can bring along with them to this new place, in the figurative sense, of knowledge about food. And Syrian food has become a steady job for many of them, who endure severe financial struggles.
“When São Paulo switched mayors in 2017, incoming official João Doria Jr. [who would later resign to run for state governor] shut down a downtown area that Fernando Haddad’s former administration (2013-2016) had supplied for refugees to sell the food they made in. They were driven out during the Doria administration and they had to get moving trucks to get their appliances back, refrigerators and commercial stoves, shawarma-making machinery, large pieces of equipment. This created many problems, including in their homes: some of the landlords would tell them that their keeping the equipment at home meant they were no longer using their places for strictly residential purposes, the researcher revealed. According to the study, one Syrian refugee who owned two restaurants had to shut both of them down, and is now living off of cooking lessons and takeout Syrian food sales, which means unsteady income according to Scagliusi.
“We noticed that all refugees are wary of the outcome of the presidential election. They are already being targeted by prejudice, getting cursed and retaliated at by supporters of [candidate Jair] Bolsonaro. They are in a very delicate position, politically and economically speaking, and the situation has worsened badly over the last few months. We aren’t sure whether Brazil will keep taking in refugees, and those that are already here could even be expelled. Since the Temer administration began (2016), the number of visas issued to refugees has plummeted, and people are very scared. It’s a situation of fragility and fear,” the researcher denounced. The interview was given to ANBA on Thursday, October 25, prior to the runoff elections on Sunday (28).
Translated by Sérgio Kakitani & Gabriel Pomerancblum
