One of Roam's big features is the ability to find all instances of a reference, create a page for it and update all the references to link to the new page.
Implementing this is on the [roadmap], but for the time being you can:
Cmd+Shift+Fto find all the references, e.g. "Cat food"Cmd+Shift+Hto replace them with [[cat-food]].- Click any of the references to create a new note.