to each of the chapters in this volume, concerns food justice, which can be defined as “the struggle against racism, exploitation, and oppression taking place within the food system that addresses inequalities’ root causes both within and beyond the food chain” (Hislop 2014). Food justice scholarship initially began to cohere around the question of access to healthy food, and the observation that this access was severely limited in many low-income communities and communities of color (Beulac et al. 2009; Cummins and Macintyre 2002; Walker et al. 2010). Scholars examining this disparity as a part of the food system looked at the presence or absence of grocery stores and alternative sites of food distribution, such as farmers’ markets or community gardens. The food intersections approach, on the other hand, requires us to look beyond the food itself. Monica White’s Freedom Farmers (2018), for example, examines the roles that Black farmers have historically played in establishing and supporting Black freedom struggles, while Joshua Sbicca’s Food Justice Now! (2018) emphasizes the existing and potential alliances between activists focused on food and those working for immigrant rights, improved labor conditions, and prison abolition.
This volume lends support to this emerging focus on food intersections by drawing connections between food and the processes of racialized under-development that first devalued urban neighborhoods and later incentivized the return of (often white) capital to these places (Ramírez 2015; Reese 2019). We demonstrate that food influences the urbanization of neoliberalism, the process through which cities become increasingly central to elite accumulation of capital (Pinson and Morel Journel 2016), and the racialization of everyday life for new and long-term urban residents (Alkon and Cadji 2018; Egerer and Fairbain 2018; McClintock 2018; Sbicca and Myers 2017). Several of the chapters in this volume (4, 5, 8, 13, 14) highlight that underdevelopment has created opportunities for communities to reclaim space through urban agriculture, who then struggle to maintain these spaces as land values escalate. Other chapters (2, 3, 9) describe how cities encourage and celebrate local food and new food retail as evidence of their revitalization, which often brings devastating consequences for historically rooted communities of color. Each of these analyses examines the ways that food impacts and is impacted by the racialized processes of development and neglect.
A second way that gentrification contributes to food scholarship is by bridging debates between Marxist-inspired scholars that focus on the political economy of food production (Friedland 1984; Friedman 1982; McMichael 2009) and post-structural scholars that emphasize the cultural politics of food consumption (Coveney 2006; DeVault 1994; Murcott 1983; Warde 1997). The first group seeks to explain how capitalism’s growth logic compels agricultural practices that harm people and the planet, often suggesting that overthrowing capitalism is necessary for a sustainable and just food system (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000; Guthman 2014). On the other hand, scholars focused on culture attend to shifts in consumption, believing that they may nudge the food system, even if it is still capitalist, in greater alignment with environmental and human needs (Johnston and Baumann 2010; Lyson 2004), an approach that draws on and contributes much to JK Gibson-Graham’s (2006) influential work on alternative economies. This conflict between structure and culture is not unique to the study of food and indeed is an overarching commonality between research on food and gentrification.
Examining gentrification’s food intersections helps to highlight the relationships between political economy/ecology and culture as they play out in particular places. Gentrification carries with it a set of distinctions, clearly embodying Bourdieu’s (1984) notion of taste as culturally produced and inseparable from social positioning and power. With regard to food, these tastes include a “desire for alternative foods, both gourmet and organic” (Zukin 2008) and gentrification has long been associated with the emergence of alternative food spaces such as farmers’ markets, community gardens, and health food stores (chapters 6, 7 and 8 in this volume, and Anguelovski 2015; McClintock 2018; Zukin 2009). Cities use their regional culinary traditions, particularly the upscaling of working-class regional dishes, such as tacos in San Diego (chapter 1) or refined Cajun and Creole dishes in New Orleans (chapter 5), to produce socially constructed “authentic” cultural identities (Gaytan 2008) that can appeal to the so-called creative class (Florida 2003). This is also a racialized process, as the foodways of communities of color are repackaged, often by white chefs, for primarily white audiences (Passidomo 2017; Twitty 2016). Food is clearly tied to the aesthetic dimension of gentrification, but the production of these tastes is a method through which capital becomes reproduced and further concentrated. If political economy is the primary driver of gentrification (Quastel 2009; Smith 2008 [1982]), then culture is the terrain on which it is driven, and a means by which capitalists compete with one another to accumulate profits. Because food retail is so essential to the development of gentrifying places and the aesthetics of gentrification preference local, organic, and elevated working-class foodways, examining the intersection of food and gentrification provides new insights on how food production works in tandem with the cultural politics of consumption.
One topic that has been the subject of tremendous interest in recent years includes examinations of alternative food systems and food movements, particularly with regard to how activists address, or fail to address, issues of social, racial, and environmental justice (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Gottlieb and Joshi 2010; Sbicca 2018). Social scientists have been critical of these alternatives, which tend to be dominated by white, wealthy, and formally educated individuals, for their lack of ethnoracial and economic inclusiveness, and for failing to seek out, understand, and promote initiatives already present in marginalized communities (Guthman 2008; Kato 2013; Reynolds and Cohen 2016; Slocum 2007). Moreover, food movements tend to focus on the creation of alternative food systems that stress organic production and local distribution rather than making strategic interventions through policy or collective action that can transform the food system and the systems of oppression and exploitation with which it interacts, though to some degree, this is beginning to change (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Holt-Giménez and Shattuck 2011; Roman-Alcalá 2018; Sbicca 2018).
In a context of unabashed popular media praise for these alternatives, paying attention to gentrification offers a sobering corrective. Initiatives like farmers’ markets and urban agriculture have spread rapidly over the last 20 years, providing new economic opportunity to local and regional farmers (Low et al. 2015). But several of the chapters in this volume reveal how urban boosters highlight these spaces to appeal to newcomers (chapters 4, 7, 8), a process that can directly oppose the food justice goals that sometimes motivated their initiation (chapter 10). In contrast, chapter 3 argues convincingly that local food retailers in Oklahoma City consciously chose to market their products to the city’s newer and upscale residents, and in doing so, abandoned the progressive political potential of their initiative. Our focus on food and gentrification adds to scholarly critiques about the sometimes unintended consequences of alternative food systems; not only are they often associated with privileged people and places, but they can help to create new exclusionary places by contributing to the ethnoracial and economic shifts wrought by gentrification.
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