Stocking the Shelves With a Taste of Home

Jung Yun still remembers the first day she arrived in the United States. She was 4 years old in 1975, when she, her mother, and her sister departed South Korea for their new home in Fargo, North Dakota. Yun’s father had been awaiting their arrival, having spent the past year finding work as a martial arts instructor. He prepared his mobile home for their welcome, complete with a thoughtfully arranged bowl of fruit. It was the first time Yun had ever seen, let alone tasted, a banana. That was her first exposure to the notion that food in America was going to be different.

In Yun’s childhood memory, her family were some of the only Koreans living in town; census data estimates 75 Korean American residents in Fargo in 1980. While Yun and her sister ate “American” hot lunches of green beans and hamburgers at school, at home her mother cooked traditional Korean meals. “It always felt like home to me because of the food,” says Yun, who is an associate professor at George Washington University and author of O Beautiful.

Since there wasn’t a sizable Asian grocery store nearby, Yun’s family would pile into the car two or three times a year and drive four hours to Minneapolis or 11 hours to Chicago. There, they would weave the small aisles of an Asian grocer, carts stacked precariously high with produce. Yun remembers other customers eyeing her family’s stockpiles, with expressions not of judgment or concern, but a look of, “You’re not from here.”

Once home, their supply would get squirreled away in accumulated refrigerators and freezers — in the garage, basement, and kitchen — carefully packed and preserved to feed the family during the intervening months until the next big haul. “It was such a regular part of my childhood and teenage years, doing these giant ingredient hauls,” Yun says. “We just didn’t have weekly or monthly access to the ingredients we needed.”

In the decades since Yun’s family moved to the U.S., the country’s palate has widened. Door Dash customers order quesadillas and garlic naan more often than pepperoni pizza; 70 percent of U.S. counties have a Chinese restaurant; birria and yuzu are household names; and Gen Z thinks ramen is comfort food. But even as tastes have become more global, easy access to international cuisine and ingredients has yet to reach much of America’s heartland.

99 Ranch, the largest Asian supermarket chain in the U.S., has no stores in North Dakota or any neighboring states. The closest Patel Brothers franchise, the South Asian supermarket giant, is in Illinois.

In places like North Dakota, where international chains and box stores can be scarce, residents have either had to face long drives for ethnic groceries or become reliant on immigrant families starting their own businesses. Yun’s hometown of Fargo, currently home to around 5,000 Asian Americans, now boasts Asian and American Supermarket, a sprawling 20,000 square-foot megamart owned by a brother-and-sister duo from Vietnam. In Rogers, Arkansas, a town where less than 1.5 percent of the population is Black, an Afro-Caribbean grocer called Tropical Food Market sells roasted beef suya and chicken gizzard kebabs. And in Ames, Iowa, where the Arab population likely numbers fewer than 500, Pammel Grocery is a beloved haven. These stores are critical not only to families like Yun’s; they also introduce their cultures to a broader audience who might otherwise be unfamiliar with ingredients like sumac, gochujang, or berbere.

At his store Asian Mart in Burnsville, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, Watson Fong sells to immigrant families who travel from cities like Rochester and as far away as Fargo or Sioux Falls in the Dakotas. His store is one of the only places for miles specifically hawking Filipino groceries.

Fong is never surprised when people go out of their way to find his market, looking for banana chips, lumpia, or the Magnolia ice creams that remind them of their childhoods. “Food helps our homesickness,” Fong says. Even with the rise of internet shopping, there’s a comfort to standing in a place surrounded by your favorite foods.

Fong first moved to Minnesota in 1998 to study computer programming. Coming from Manila, the biggest transition was the weather, then the traffic, then the food. “I’ve been telling the new immigrants that you’re lucky that we have this now,” Fong says of his market. “Before, we had to drive to Chicago back and forth just to eat.” Apart from monthly trips to Chicago, Fong would stock his suitcases with canned goods and bottles during visits to the Philippines.

Asian Mart has changed hands four to five times in the past 20 years, with each owner infusing their own foods and cultures: Thai, Hmong, and Vietnamese. When Fong took over five years ago, he made changes slowly but deliberately. He eventually installed a deli counter serving hot foods, like slightly sweet jumbo Filipino red hot dogs and fried lechon kawali, pork belly slabs that have been seasoned and deep-fried. Fong chose to focus on Filipino foods partly in response to the influx of Filipino doctors, nurses, and IT professionals he noticed moving into the area, and partly to fulfill his desire for a nearby Filipino grocery store. “Even the local Americans, they want to try new things,” Fong says.

When we spoke, Fong was preparing a package for a customer in Grand Marais, a town with fewer than 2,000 residents close to the Canadian border. Fong doesn’t accept online orders anymore — he couldn’t keep up with the demand — but he could relate to having limited access to Filipino foods. He has already made two shipments to this customer, packing whatever she is craving at the time.

With demand growing quickly over the last five years, Fong is outgrowing his space. Currently, he is working on opening a second, larger store that can serve as both a warehouse, allowing him to import goods directly from the Philippines, and a Filipino restaurant. He is investing back in the state and the customers who have allowed him to feel at home. “I like the people here. It’s quiet,” Fong says. “Although, of course, the winter, but that’s fine.”

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of immigrants and white colonists crossed the Missouri River in search of land to establish farms or homesteads, settling in areas that are now North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, and Colorado. Much of this land was confiscated from the Lakota people only decades earlier, after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills prompted Congress to effectively nullify the 1868 Treaty of Laramie, which had protected the Great Sioux Reservation as Native property. The 1862 Homestead Act also facilitated migration, giving immigrants, newly freed Black Americans, and single women the opportunity to claim land and work for themselves, while also economically developing the region.

Many Arab settlers who were drawn to the Great Plains as homesteaders ultimately found success as peddlers, traveling across cities and states to sell dry goods. In 1908, a number of these peddlers organized to publish the Syrian Business Directory, a compendium listing every Syrian enterprise in the country. In his review of the 2002 book, The Prairie Peddlers, sociologist Philip Kayal refers to an old Arab proverb: “Trade takes a man far.” According to Kayal, “If Syrians do anything well, it is buying and selling. Peddling Syrians is not a stereotype. It was their signature occupation.”

In his book, Muslims of the Heartland, Edward Curtis writes that by 1915, about a dozen of the 52 grocery stores in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, were owned by Syrians. He also unearthed a 1911 newspaper article heralding a Syrian farmer for introducing a new dry-weather crop to the state, declaring it a “new kind of pea grown for the first time in this country.” The crop was the chickpea, which has since become indispensable to the Great Plains region; Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Washington now produce the majority of the nation’s supply. Between 2015 and 2018, U.S. chickpea production surged, climbing from 250 million pounds to one billion pounds annually.

But while it was once a land of opportunity for new immigrants, the Great Plains began to lose appeal as the Homestead Act wound down, leaving little available land and limited prospects for newcomers. Around the same time, the early 20th century brought restrictive immigration policies and quotas, which changed population patterns throughout the country. In 1915, over 79 percent of all residents of the newly established state of North Dakota were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Today, only 5 percent of people in the state were born outside the U.S., and another 5 percent have at least one parent who is an immigrant. As the Great Plains lost much of the diversity that drove its success, it also grew increasingly unwelcoming to newcomers. Earlier this year, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem referred to migration at the southern border as an “invasion” and said the state would only accept Afghan refugees if she could be assured that they “don’t want to destroy this country.” North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley stoked fears about immigration at the northern border, warning that the “worst is yet to come.”

Despite these tensions, a fresh wave of immigration in states like North Dakota is being driven by a labor shortage in manufacturing, oil production, and nursing. For new immigrants entering these largely white, conservative areas, finding a home usually means, once again, building it yourself.

Fowzia Adde fled the ongoing civil war in Somalia when she was 12 years old, spending her teenage years in a refugee camp in Kenya where she helped her mother sell clothing and jewelry. In 1997, she was granted asylum in the U.S., eventually settling in Fargo. Others from her camp also landed there, but Adde still felt out of place in a city with relatively few Black people. She remembers people stopping and looking at her at the grocery store. “The kids used to stand up and stare at me,” she says.

During lunch breaks on a production line for a local wholesaler, Adde and her friends would lament the foods and ingredients they missed from their homelands. If she needed spices, like cardamom and dried onions, Adde would make the long drive to Chicago or Minneapolis. She remembers asking a prayer leader how she and the Muslim community should handle eating meat without a halal market in the neighborhood. “He said, say ‘Bismillah’ and just eat it for now until we can find out where we can find our own meat.”

Adde and her co-conspirators created a plan to start a market — a place they could find the foods they wanted when they wanted. But securing the funding proved to be difficult. “Raising money in a white town was not easy,” Adde says. “There was no lending that was aimed toward the new Americans.” So, she created the opportunity for herself.

In 2003, Adde launched the Immigrant Development Center, a nonprofit dedicated to building economic opportunities for low-income refugees and immigrants, including a lending center offering the type of entrepreneurial support Adde was once denied. In 2016, the organization also fulfilled Adde’s original goal of starting a market: The International Market Plaza, a multicultural shopping center with 18 stores, among them grocers, gift shops, tailors, and restaurants.

Adde says the shopping center “took off like an airplane, right away,” with business owners occupying every available space in the building. People from across North Dakota travel there to visit Rogers Grocery, an Arab grocer carrying foods native to West Asia and Africa, including items from Iraq, Bosnia, Liberia, and Somalia. The organization also hired local artists to paint large murals depicting women in outdoor fruit and vegetable markets, and African women wearing hijabs, with some of the faces inspired by Adde’s own children and those of her friends.

While many in the community welcomed the cultural exchange, the town also faced a surge of hate. In 2022, hundreds of fliers were distributed across Fargo promoting “The Great Replacement,” a racist conspiracy that immigrants and people of color are “replacing” white Americans. In September of the same year, the murals outside the International Market Plaza were vandalized by members of the Texas-based white supremacist group Patriot Front, which identifies as an organization of “American nationalists.” The vandals defaced the artwork by spray-painting the Patriot Front emblem over the painted faces of Black and brown women.

The attack initially rattled the community, leaving some hesitant to return to the market. But Adde found that others came back more resolute than ever. The organization was able to raise nearly $20,000 to replace the murals, with the new artwork featuring the theme, “Together we are stronger united as one.”

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Immigrants in the U.S. are 80 percent more likely to start businesses than their native-born counterparts, according to a 2022 study co-authored by economists from MIT, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania. Part of the reason is practical: For decades, immigrants faced countless obstacles in the American workforce. Some were unable to get jobs due to language barriers and discrimination, or they struggled to have their prior qualifications acknowledged. If new arrivals needed to work, that often meant having to create that work for themselves.

But perhaps it is also partly about serving a community. In the 2022 study, the authors note that “immigrants act more as ‘job creators’ than ‘job takers.’” Starting a new life in a new country means having to rely on a community that came before you. Paying it forward means creating opportunities for those who come after.

Fola Sodade is quick to say that Jums African Market, the Afro-Caribbean grocery he runs with his wife in Springfield, Missouri, is not enough to support a family of five, or four, or even three. Sodade works a full-time job as a medical researcher, while his wife sometimes works nights to be available at the store during the day. But entrepreneurship is in Sodade’s blood; his parents sold goods made of raw African leather, as well as Indian artifacts, in their stores in Nigeria. Having grown up working in their shops, Sodade hopes to pass on that same legacy of entrepreneurship to his own children.

Jums African Market is a labor of love. When Sodade and his family first moved to Missouri, they would drive to Dallas to pick up African spices and yam tubers. Friends started making requests, so Sodade stocked up on supplies and sold them out of his van after church service. Eventually, in 2018, he turned that into a brick-and-mortar store, the first Afro-Caribbean market of its kind in the Springfield area.

Sodade calls the market an African gateway or an African food embassy. He knows that when new arrivals come to Springfield from countries like Kenya, Ghana, and Cameroon — perhaps starting jobs as doctors, nurses, or students — their first Google search will be for an African market. “Food comes first,” Sodade says. He takes pride in being their ambassador to the city and answering their questions: Where can they find a tailor that can adjust their oversized clothing? Where can they connect with a Swahili translator? He estimates he has welcomed over 200 new African immigrants to the area. “We kind of give them the stability, like, ‘Hey, you’re going to be fine.’”

Sodade noticed people traveling from across Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas to shop at Jums. When he had more time at his disposal, he’d personally deliver groceries to customers in neighboring cities, like Joplin, over an hour away. Recently, he started a WhatsApp group to keep his regulars updated on new items: fresh taro root, green plantains, smoked catfish, and goat meat. He has food coming directly from Nigeria and the Congo, supplemented with meat and produce from distributors in Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. But he also discovered how difficult it was to find wholesalers who would travel to Jums just to drop off two or three pallets worth of products. “We still make sure that we serve our people the best we can,” Sodade says. “And we are never done learning.”

Nate Papes/Eater

Jums doesn’t only serve African residents. Customers unfamiliar with African cooking come to the store seeking guidance. With them in mind, Sodade’s wife Jumoke wrote and published her own cookbook that they sell in the market. The couple also started a mobile food truck called Desire and opened an in-store kitchen for takeaway, giving new customers a taste of foods like amala served with gbegiri and ewedu (mashed yam flour with black-eyed pea soup and jute leaf stew). It’s important for Sodade to familiarize a variety of patrons with his food so they’ll want to cook it themselves. “I just want people to learn the cultures of other people,” Sodade says. “My whole idea is, can we have a cultural integration or cultural infusion?”

“I believe when more people come together, they can find solutions to have a lasting peace,” he adds.

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When I ask Adde what she loves about North Dakota, she struggles to come up with an answer. “I may be missing something, or maybe I need to do more work,” she says. “North Dakota is a very cold place to be.” In New York and Washington, D.C., Adde says she met people “who are so open-minded and know the world.” In North Dakota, as a woman of color, there are extra roadblocks for her to be respected. “In particular, when you’re Black in this town, it’s not easy,” she says.

Though things are getting better, Adde wonders if doors are opening because she is the one creating them in the first place. “I spend everything in my market,” she says. “If I want to get my hair done, I’m going to the market. [It’s where] I want to get my makeup done, go to the clothing market, where I buy my food. I spend the money back to them because I am proud of the work I have done.”

Sodade recognizes that fellow immigrants find more opportunities and greater comfort in larger cities like St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago. He describes Springfield as a “transitional zone,” a place where people take what they need, perhaps in terms of an education or as a launching pad, and then leave. Sodade hopes his market encourages people to stay, making it a space where other Africans can feel at home — because he’s found that in Springfield. “I call Springfield my peace,” he says.

Sodade sometimes feels judged by friends who have left town, but he is committed to staying. “They sound as if I’m wasting away,” he says. “But I want that story to turn around. I want this place [to] become more diverse, with more opportunities for different people. Let everybody feel welcome to a point that they can decide to do business here.”

Trisha Gopal is a James Beard-nominated writer and editor covering race, identity, and the issues facing immigrants and communities of color. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Tyrel Iron Eyes is a Lakota photographer based in the Standing Rock Nation, seeking to tell stories of the everyday and extraordinary.
Chris McDuffie is a Minneapolis-based photographer and filmmaker known for his creative versatility, having collaborated with major brands like Nike, YouTube, and GQ. His unique approach, shaped by a diverse artistic background and passion for emerging technologies like Generative AI, has earned him widespread recognition in the visual arts industry.
Nathan Papes is a photographer based in the heart of the Ozarks with expertise in photojournalism and editorial photography. For more than 15 years he has been telling the stories of his local communities through a lens.
Copy edited by Laura Michelle Davis