According to the Collective:
This is a reclaiming of the commons, of the streets that are rapidly being disconnected from their history through gentrification. Here, we will eat publicly at the intersection of food, art, and justice. We also meet at the intersection of Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X’s birthdays, and at 28th St. and Magnolia St., the site of [Black Panther] Lil Bobby Hutton’s murder by the Police 50 years ago … We deliberately create and take up space, while focusing on building health and connection. In the face of a gentrifying Oakland, this is how we feed a revolution.
The community began the meal with locally gathered yerba buena and rosehip tea offered by Café Ohlone, which features and promotes local indigenous foodways. The Collective then offered Japanese pickles to represent the community uprooted from the neighborhood during World War II. The main course of pulled chicken, beans, corn bread, and collard greens paid homage to both the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for School Children program, which began in this neighborhood and which the PKC often cites as an inspiration, as well as to the neighborhood’s Black history more generally. The day was warm and so was the atmosphere, filled with hugs and handshakes in a sort of extended family reunion. During the meal, diners shared music, poetry, and conversation centered around the question “what does your neighborhood need?” Collective co-founder Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik read a letter written on behalf of Donald Foster, a longtime journalist and community activist who is being evicted from the street where the event took place, and urged attendees to support him.
Figure I.1. STREETS! was a free community meal for 500 people provided by the People’s Kitchen Collective in celebration of resilience amidst gentrification in West Oakland. Photo by Sana Javeri Kadri.
Jocelyn Jackson, another co-founder, describes West Oakland as “the perfect place to speak to gentrification. On the blocks we’re setting tables, people are being displaced. Even if transition is happening, it’s important to claim the space as home.”
Taken together, these stories reveal the complex entanglements between food and gentrification that this volume seeks to unpack. The furor over ink! Coffee speaks to the role of food retail in upscaling communities. The trendy coffee shop, restaurant, or grocery store in the long divested neighborhood is often viewed as a harbinger of things to come. In the words of spoken word poet Bobby LeFebre, who read his powerful poem “Denver, Where Have You Gone” at ink! Coffee, protests:
Remember that food desert, Denver?/
The one on the block overrun with liquor stores/
There’s a Whole Foods there now/
Remember that affordable rent, Denver?/
The one that comfortably accommodated a family of five/
There’s a $500,000 loft there now, Denver/
By juxtaposing changes in the food landscape with increasing housing prices, LeFebre suggests a link between dining and dispossession. Our goal in this volume is to unpack this link, illuminating the variety of ways that food businesses and food activists can drive, augment, and contest gentrification.
In today’s food-focused popular culture, cafes like ink! Coffee and upscale grocery stores like Whole Foods, are essential to how neighborhoods brand themselves as hip, creative places. To investors, these businesses indicate that an area is ripe for redevelopment. According to Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate online marketplace Zillow, “The entry of a coffee shop into a location provides a signaling function to other types of investors … that this neighborhood has now arrived and is open for business in a way that it was not before” (quoted in Kohli 2015). In this sense, food retail serves to shape the larger built environment; hip coffee shops are imbued with a cultural capital that translates into economic capital in the form of rising land values. Perhaps the problem with ink! Coffee’s sign was not only that it was obnoxious, but that it was true in a way that reaches beyond the shop owners’ presumed intentions. Coffee shops really can gentrify a neighborhood, or at least they can play a material and symbolic role. The first half of this volume examines the role of food spaces—restaurants, grocery stores, and alternative food initiatives like urban farms and gardens—in drawing new investors and residents into a neighborhood.
Figure I.2. ink! Coffee in Five Points tagged after community outrage over gentrification sign. Photo by Lindsey Bartlett.
Kalegate represents the processes through which changing foodscapes and foodways have become symbols of gentrification. The New York Times coverage was not really about food; the sole comment about kale is buried several paragraphs in. And yet it was kale that became a flash point for debates about gentrification, and who gets to speak, publicly and privately, for and about a city. Kale has become symbolic of gentrification, of the foodways of new residents, and in this case, of their unwillingness to recognize and engage with anything but a superficial version of their city’s long-standing, vibrant culture. Deriding the perceived absence of kale casts the city as removed from mainstream dining trends, and more broadly, from the everyday concerns of those who occupy privileged social locations. In response, New Orleanians mocked the cultural cluelessness of many recent transplants and asserted their own longstanding senses of place. Food is implicated not only in controversies about who gets to (or has to) live where, but about how and by whom a city is defined. The changing foodways that push and accompany gentrification are a theme that runs throughout many of the chapters in this volume, from the high-end taco shops in San Diego’s Barrio Logan (chapter 1) to the “reinvention” of working-class cuisine in Vancouver’s long-impoverished Downtown Eastside (chapter 9). Black feminist writer Mikki Kendall (2014) calls this “food gentrification,” and worries that this will put “traditional meals out of reach of those who created the recipes” (see also Ho 2014). But our concerns in this volume go beyond food access. Here we link the symbolic gentrification of foods to increased property values, rising rents, and dispossession and displacement.
Because food has become such a strong symbol of gentrification, as well as a marker of a neighborhood’s “readiness” for redevelopment, food justice activists like the People’s Kitchen Collective deploy food as a lens through which to resist the dispossession of their communities (Crouch 2012; Markham 2014; Massey 2017). Sometimes, activists’ goals are limited to maintaining access to their own urban gardens (Glowa 2017). Other times, they seek to safeguard the ability of long-term inhabitants to claim their right to the city, whether for growing food, eating, or just gathering. The chapters in the second half of this volume tell of the struggles of long-term residents and newcomers, sometimes in conflict with one another and other times working together, who attempt to influence cities that increasingly orient themselves toward developers, wealthy industries, and foreign investment. Some, like the immigrant gardeners in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant and East New York neighborhoods (chapter 11) and Cleveland’s Black urban gardeners (chapter 13), draw on long-standing and deeply held practices of food production and community organizing. Or, in the case of Chicago’s Puerto Rican diaspora, culturally significant commercial food zones like East Humboldt Park’s Paseo Boricua become frontline struggles for food sovereignty and to stop gentrification (chapter 12). Others, such as Oakland’s Phat Beets Produce (chapter 10), use food as a sort of gastrodiplomacy (Chapple-Sokol 2013) intended
