During the 2017-2018 academic year, I am a visiting researcher at the Department of Food and Nutrition, and Sport Science at the University of Gothenburg. While here, I am working on a few project. First, I am conducting research on initiatives in Europe that seek to bring diverse groups-- for example, immigrants and non-immigrants, or people of different racial or religious backgrounds-- over food. My work will contribute to research that seeks to understand how food can create and sustain communities, or conversely how it can serve to highlight and reinforce divisions. Second, I will begin a new comparative study that will compare the food experiences of Somali immigrants in the United States and Sweden. My research will contribute to our understanding of the “healthy immigrant paradox,” or the finding that newly-arrived immigrants are often healthier than their native-born counterparts. These advantages deteriorate over time and across generations. Our understanding of the “healthy immigrant paradox,” especially as it relates to food, is hampered by a lack of comparative research. Building on a tradition of qualitative, comparative studies of immigrants’ daily lives, my research will draw on semi-structured interviews with Somali mother-child dyads in urban ethnic enclaves and rural communities in Sweden and the United States in order to investigate how immigrants’ diets are tied to racial, ethnic, religious, and gender identities, as well as to particular contextual factors.