Why Immigrant Food Traditions Endure

When I moved to the United States in 2001, everything felt temporary for the first few years. I flew back and forth between India and the U.S., unsure which place would eventually feel like home. Yet one thing stayed consistent through all that toggling: what I cooked.

It wasn’t the elaborate festival dishes. It was the daily, ordinary food — the lentils, sabzis, and chai that didn’t require reinvention. At the time, I didn’t think of it as emotional strategy. Now, after years of researching immigrant families for my dissertation, I see it differently.

Across cultures — whether Gujarati, Dominican, Filipino, Lebanese, or Nigerian — families often cling to their food traditions not to preserve the past, but to steady the present. In my interviews, people rarely spoke about “nostalgia.” They spoke about continuity - About keeping one thing constant when everything else was up for negotiation.

Food became the emotional ballast.

This is why so many immigrant kitchens look similar across generations. They may be displays of cultural pride — but mostly, they’re coping systems. Cooking familiar food gives the body something reliable to come home to, even when the outside world demands constant adjustment.

And this isn’t limited to immigrants. Anyone moving through transitions — new jobs, new cities, divorce, parenthood, grief — often returns to familiar flavors. Food stabilizes us because it asks nothing of us. It simply reminds us who we were before everything changed.

In a wellness landscape full of trends, the homes we come from may have been practicing the most accessible form of emotional regulation all along.

Continuity is grounding.

And grounding is wellness.