WHO ARE WE?

Mission

Intégration Nutrition supports new immigrants in their appropriation and learning of the local food culture. We also help Quebekers from different origins looking for food renewal throughout nutritional education services and discovery activities from here or elsewhere.

Vision

No matter if you are a new immigrant or not, immigrant from a second generation or Canadian-born, Intégration nutrition offers a healthy gourmet adventure!

Mainstream with curious taste buds

More and more involved in our society, the different cultural communities bring to our food environment a variety of flavors and smells, each one as fantastic as the others. Intégration nutrition is your abroad flavors ambassador so everyone can appreciate and be delighted by different cultures. Discovering others by their food is the best way to live as a community!

New immigrants and cultural community

When new immigrants arrive here, they are often lost, facing a completely different food culture from their own: different food preservation, meal schedule and lots of pre-prepared food. Also, immigrants’ food habits are often affected by many environmental, economics and sociocultural changes that can affect drastically their health condition. Our services aim to help multiethnic population and new immigrants: experts and foreign students, immigrants by investment and refugees to integrate Quebeckers food culture to reduce short term or long term nutritional health problems caused by the immigration process.

Intégration nutrition’s little story

The Intégration nutrition’s project idea emerged when, working as a nutritionist, I visited an African woman recently immigrated in Canada, pregnant of twins and severely malnourished. To my great astonishment, the woman had cabinets full of food. She could have fed an army! She was simply lost in the kitchen with lack of culinary knowledge. I started by explaining that it was not necessary to make fire to cook food. Then, I showed her how easily she could cook food with the electric stove. I also explained that she had to cook potatoes before eating them and canned food didn’t need to be frozen. We had so much fun together that day! After being with her all afternoon cooking vegetable soup with African spicy goat with a Quebec’s twist, I realized that this must be the reality for most new immigrants being left on their own in a food environment completely different from what they know.

Putting ourselves in immigrant’s skin

In order to have a good understanding of the problem, I am inviting you, in closing, to imagine yourself in another country, in Haiti for example, where you’ll be constraint to feed yourself with local food: igname, Malanga, manioc, mirliton, arbre veritable, giraumon, with an old pot and two pieces of charcoal. In that kind of situation, maybe you would appreciate a hand up from Intégration nutrition!