Food Bazaar is known all over the New York Metropolitan area as the supermarket that has nearly everything. Google advertises it as the “supermarket with an international focus.” Its customers see it as the one place in the city where their journey for an obscure ingredient doesn’t end in failure.
At 35–60 Junction Boulevard, Corona, stands one Food Bazaar that combines accessibility with variety to its customers. The nearby neighborhoods are Jackson Heights and Corona, both of which are known throughout New York for their diverse cultural demographics. There are large immigrant populations in these areas, which makes for unique traditions, dishes, and experiences to be circulated all throughout. Often, components of these cultural dishes may be hard to access in stereotypical markets.
To Michelle Chen, writer for The Nation and In These Times, the first place immigrants often feel at home is the place they buy the ingredients for their first home-cooked, traditional meal.1 Here, the community has no problem finding what they seek at Food Bazaar. The supermarket is a reminder of their existence in the vast web that makes up the cultures, languages, and people of New York.
Food Bazaar exists to continue preserving the many circulating cultures of its community. Without it, New Yorkers would be at risk of losing parts of their identities.
Take an impromptu shopping trip to your local supermarket and begin to wonder just how the items you see on your shelves are actually vehicles of cultural politics and social change.
Campus: Hunter College
Professor: Mike Owen Benediktsson
Location: 35-60 Junction Blvd, Corona, NY 11368
References: Chen, Michelle. 2022. “A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community.” YES! Magazine. December 22, 2022. https://www.yesmagazine.org/social-justice/2022/12/22/grocery-community-ethnic.
- Michelle Chen, “A Taste of Home: How Ethnic Grocery Stores Create Community.” Yes Magazine. 2022 ↩︎
