food studies is urban agriculture, and here, gentrification plays out through conflicts over land. Urban agriculture must compete with other land uses, especially development pressure that seeks out the “highest and best use” of land. In short, what land use will produce the most profit? Urban agriculture produces little economic value compared to housing and retail development. For-profit urban farmers are struggling to stay afloat given the tight profit margins of growing food in cities (Oberholtzer, Dimitri, and Pressman 2014; Reynolds and Cohen 2016). Instead, urban agriculture produces many useful values like community, a local food supply, a space to interact with plants and animals, and a learning environment. Urban agriculture can be, as Justine Lindemann describes it with regard to Black urban farmers in Cleveland, an “integral part of the path to social, economic, political, and spiritual liberation” (chapter 13, “Black Urban Growers in Cleveland”). However, like farmers’ markets, urban agriculture can attract people to a gentrifying neighborhood, especially when it signals a shift from abandoned or vacant land to a popular land use. As an amenity, realtors and developers can use it to “sell” a neighborhood (Alkon and Cadji 2018; McClintock 2018; chapters 4, 7, and 8) in a way that provides the urban, northern counterpart to the history of corporate land grabs across the global South (Williams and Holt-Giménez 2017). There is also localized resistance to these pressures. Long-term residents under threat of displacement, such as those profiled in chapters 10, 11, and 13, are often very attached to their gardens and are willing to fight for their right to the city. We have grouped these stories at the end of the book, as they inspire us to think through how food activism can lead to new ways to oppose displacement.
Just as these stories connect food activism to struggles for housing, a final important reason for discussing gentrification and food together is to link the essential human needs for shelter and sustenance. This can nuance the study of food in new ways. While what we eat reflects political economy, culture, and taste, so too does housing (Lees et al. 2008), and both are fundamentally rooted in access to land and place (Williams and Holt-Giménez 2017). Current patterns of returning to the city provide an opportunity to interrogate how people experience changing economic, political, and social conditions. For example, looking at gentrification through the lens of food identifies pressing biopolitical connections between bodies, health, and the built environment. The slow violence (Nixon 2011) of living in a place with little food access only to be uprooted through the violence of gentrification connects directly to inequalities in race and income that privilege white and rich bodies who can actualize their tastes beyond bodily need (Guthman 2011; Hatch 2016).
In sum, studying the intersections between food and gentrification has much to offer. In contrast to a food systems perspective, this volume calls for examining food vis-à-vis wider social processes, particularly ethnoracial and economic inequalities. Second, because food businesses are material evidence of gentrification, while particular foods have become symbolic of this form of urban development, gentrification provides a means to integrate political economy and cultural approaches to the study of food. More practically, attention to gentrification shows the limitations of contemporary food politics. As urban boosters and food entrepreneurs orient their projects toward new residents of gentrifying cities, proponents of alternative food systems are at best unwittingly implicated in the displacement of long-term communities. This becomes particularly ironic when projects were designed for or even by long-term community members in order to augment their access to fresh food. Last, interrogating the relationship between food and gentrification provides an opportunity to better link struggles for food justice to other movements for social justice. This is happening with regard to indigenous food sovereignties, prison abolition, water rights, the Movement for Black Lives, workers’ rights, and immigrant rights (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Daigle 2019; Minkoff-Zern 2019; Myers forthcoming; Movement for Black Lives n.d.; Reese 2019; Reynolds and Cohen 2016; Sbicca 2018; White 2018). In our conclusion, we highlight some ways that food movements are joining the struggles for tenants’ rights and against displacement.
The Landscape to Come
Taken together, the chapters in this volume argue that food and gentrification are deeply entangled, and that examining food retail and food practices is critical to understanding urban development. In part I, “Dining Downtown,” three chapters investigate the roles of food businesses in upscaling cities and attracting wealthy residents. First, Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J. Bosco examine how changing dining options add value to two San Diego neighborhoods in different stages of gentrification, highlighting the cultural politics of taste in what is often theorized as an economic process. Similarly, Nina Martin’s chapter draws on examples from Durham, North Carolina to illustrate the role of “savior entrepreneurs,” restaurateurs who act as small-scale developers, in buying and refurbishing downtown buildings and helping to rebrand this post-industrial city as hip and creative. In the final chapter in this section, Eric Sarmiento dissects the emerging local food movement in Oklahoma City, arguing that in orienting their work toward the city’s growing “creative class,” they redefined local food as a luxury good rather than a product that could embody environmental sustainability and social justice.
Part II, “Ripe for Growth,” examines urban agriculture’s role in both signaling and responding to a city’s readiness for development. In chapters 4 and 5, Joshua Sbicca, Pamela Arnette Broom, and Yuki Kato describe how community-based urban agriculture projects that emerged from economic and ecological crises have weathered the ensuing land booms. First, Sbicca investigates how the city of Denver’s official support for urban agriculture in the wake of the Great Recession, in tandem with urban farmers growing food in up-and-coming neighborhoods, became an “urban agriculture fix” fostering increased land values and green gentrification. Following, the authors draw on Broom’s experience as a leader in New Orleans’ urban agriculture movement to show how gardens drew in new residents, creating both alliances and tensions with long-term residents and gardeners. In the subsequent chapter, Emily Becker and Nathan McClintock investigate how gentrification affects the meaning of community in a community orchard in Portland with an intent to serve long-term residents. In contrast, Charlotte Glennie’s chapter demonstrates the power of racially and class privileged community gardeners in Seattle to solidify their own land tenure by convincing urban boosters that their gardens are an important amenity for new residents.
Parts III and IV delve into various community responses to gentrification. Part III describes what we call “Uneven Alliances” between middle-class food activists and long-term community members. First, Michelle Glowa and Antonio Roman-Alcalá investigate how the organizations that comprise the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance negotiate ethnoracial and economic differences in the context of gentrification. Next, Zachary Hyde critically analyzes the role of community-minded social entrepreneurs who develop “ethical” restaurants in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, arguing that while they may intend to act as social preservationists, they co-opt community-based dissent and resistance to gentrification. In contrast, Alison Hope Alkon, Yahya Josh Cadji, and “Aunti” Frances Moore describe the formation of an alliance between long-term resident Aunti Frances’s Self-Help Hunger Program and relative newcomer Phat Beets Produce. This alliance has used food to create strong relationships and to engage in campaigns against gentrification
