These food-focused developments shed light on one of the unifying theoretical threads that run through this book: Structural investment in new food spaces and individual consumers’ tastes interact to intensify the social, economic, and cultural transformation of gentrifying neighborhoods. Food retail and food activism serve as ideal, tangible focal points for examining how this process unfolds. For example, a healthy supermarket’s establishment in a neighborhood that previously lacked access to fresh food could be an initiator of gentrification rather than an attempt to expand neighborhood food security (Anguelovski 2016; Figueora and Alkon 2017). Chapters in this volume investigate when and how new food retail enters a neighborhood; how long-term and new residents respond to new food retail; and how and under what circumstances local activists use food as a tool to embrace or organize against gentrification.
Another important contribution of this volume is the inclusion of multiple studies that examine urban agriculture in the context of gentrification. Urban gardens and farms are sites of food production and social gathering but are distinct urban spaces from conventional food retail venues. Urban gardens have historically served as a place for low-income people of color in the city to grow food that supplements their pantry, reminds them of home, and provides a place for ethnic or neighborhood solidarity (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2014; Saldivar-Tanaka 2004). In recent years, however, urban agriculture has gained broader popularity in cities across North America, often embraced as a part of the “green city” ethic that urban officials and planners use to promote environmental sustainability (Campbell 2017). But recent scholarship has warned, and indeed found, that urban gardens, like farmers’ markets and farm-to-table restaurants, can contribute to green or ecological gentrification (Alkon and Cadji 2018; Brasswell 2018), the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects (Bryson 2013; Checker 2011; Dooling 2009; Gould and Lewis 2016; Quastel 2009).
For the most part, green gentrification is conceptualized as a top-down process led by cities and is sometimes even described as a “planning effort” (Dooling and Simon 2002, 104). With regard to urban agriculture, Nathan McClintock (2018) argues that “household-scale UA [urban agriculture]—a socially reproductive practice—becomes cultural capital that a sustainable city’s growth coalition in turn valorizes as symbolic sustainability capital used to extract rent and burnish the city’s brand” (579). While we highlight examples of green gentrification initiated by cities’ growth coalitions, most notably chapter 4’s S*Park, which offers a commercial urban farm as an amenity for a new, upscale housing complex, chapters 5 and 10 examine the everyday practices of gardeners and food activists in New Orleans and Oakland who see their own work appropriated by urban boosters. In contrast, chapter 7 describes how Seattle’s predominantly affluent community gardeners successfully preserved their gardens by hitching them to urban growth coalition values. These cases broaden our understanding of how green gentrification can operate as a multidimensional process, pushing us to attend to powerful actors, such as developers and city officials, as well as the everyday practices of communities.
Public sentiments toward gentrification have shifted over the last decade, with an increasing number of “social preservationists” expressing appreciation for and a desire to safeguard local culture and traditions (Brown-Saracino 2009; Hyra 2017). Regardless of their motives, many educated, liberal newcomers feel conflicted about their role in changing neighborhoods (Donnelly 2018; Schlichtman, Patch, and Hill 2017). This conundrum complicates newcomers’ everyday consumption decisions. Where do they shop to satisfy their ideological sensibilities toward social equity and their desire for cultural experiences? Food becomes a particularly pronounced point of contention for these decisions, as food purchases and consumption occur daily and yet represent a public performance of social differentiation. Thus, food has the potential to serve as a point of connection between new and long-standing residents while also becoming a form of green distinction (Horton 2003), or what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (2017) calls “inconspicuous consumption,” in which elites and those aspiring to elite status elevate the importance of intangible experiences over the accumulation of flashy things.
Can these conflicted gentrifiers help strengthen local activism against gentrification, or are food purchasing decisions simply a symbolic gesture that resolves “white guilt” with few real outcomes—or worse yet, becomes another form of displacement by dominating anti-gentrification efforts? In what ways could or should grassroots activism engage with well-intended newcomers with privileges and resources in resisting and calling out negative impacts of gentrification? The chapters in the final sections of this volume explore these questions and offer candid and humble examinations of the parameters of challenging gentrification with food. Chapters in parts III and IV present varying degrees of success in raising awareness, framing food injustices, and building solidarity. This volume does not offer any definitive methods for preventing gentrification. We instead highlight how people use food and foodways to reclaim their communities. Growing, preparing, and eating food mobilize the public around issues of social justice in ways that are distinct from housing, the criminal justice system, or employment.
What Does Gentrification Bring to Food Scholarship?
Just as food has much to offer to scholars and activists interested in unpacking gentrification, studying gentrification brings valuable insights to the study of food. To date, interdisciplinary approaches to food have explored a variety of questions: what and with whom we eat, how food is produced and processed, and how food fits into various aspects of contemporary social life (Belasco 2008; Carolan 2016; DeSoucey 2017). The field, though, has begun to move away from a food systems focus on the material and social processes that are involved in the cultivation, processing, distribution, and consumption of food (Allen 2008; Kloppenberg et al. 2000; Hinrichs and Lyson 2008; McMichael 1994) and toward what we call a “food intersections” approach, which examines the ways food is shaped by, and has consequences for, various aspects of social, political, and ecological life. Not only does food commonly become a target for social movements, markets, and states—what Michaela DeSoucey (2016) calls “gastropolitics”—but, when viewed through the lens of food intersections, it becomes enmeshed in struggles over land, resources, identity, and culture that reach far beyond food itself.
An important example of this approach, and one that is relevant 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)