Leya Neema remembers a time, not long after she and her family settled in the United States in 1998 as refugees from Burundi, when they would sit down to a dinner of raw ramen noodles.

“We didn’t know how to make ramen noodles … so for a long time we’d eat them uncooked. And crunch on them,” recalls Neema, now a case manager in the Refugee Resettlement Program with the Catherine McAuley Center in Cedar Rapids, which serves refugees from more than 50 countries. “We would dip it in tea and then eat it.

“The problem isn’t that we were not getting food,” she says. Instead, “we didn’t know how to eat it. A lot of the food available at food pantries are things in boxes, cans or precooked.”

There were times, Neema adds, when this type of food insecurity would lead to health challenges. “A lot of families didn’t have a lot of food in Africa and ate simple with fufu [a common staple in West Africa] and vegetables, which are not in a lot of food banks,” she explains. “Here, we’d get boxed foods and canned foods, but when you’re being introduced to a new culture and new foods, it can be upsetting to your stomach. It’s a new thing introduced to your body and can make you sick, which can scare you from trying other things.”

Neema and her family’s experience with the U.S. food system is one shared by other immigrant and refugee families. It’s estimated that more than 24% of immigrants experience food insecurity, about twice the rate of the general population, according to Bread for the World, a national organization that advocates for policy changes to end hunger. They are often forced out of their home countries because of war and persecution, only to face food insecurity here.

Read the rest of the story here, from our Iowa Stops Hunger publication.