The last time I came to this place I was extremely disappointed with the service I received […] I don’t know what’s worse: getting treated like shit by sorry to say it but white people who see nothing but a dark colored man in construction clothes or getting treated like shit in your own neighborhood by your own people who see nothing but a dark guy in construction clothes. The whole experience made me really upset and sad.
The “good taste” narratives that reify ethnic and working-class foods and commodify the neighborhoods where such foods have been historically prepared and consumed—albeit in different ways—are not produced in a vacuum. Neither are they simply the reflection of changing consumer preferences. As Zukin et al. (2009) argue, gentrification is a cultural process that is shaped by powerful actors. In our study neighborhoods, these actors include the restaurant industry, developers, neighborhood organizations, and local governments, who benefit from creating foodscapes that are perceived as authentic and cosmopolitan. For instance, in our two study areas, events such as the Taste of North Park, Ray at Night, or the Barrio Art Crawl are organized by neighborhood business associations to encourage visitors to come and explore art and food. The City of San Diego is also actively using food as a way to draw people to these neighborhoods through various sponsored events and publications praising Barrio Logan’s “authentic culinary delights” (San Diego Tourism Authority 2018) and describing North Park as a “true food lover’s sanctuary, for every craving and every taste bud” (Explore North Park 2018). San Diego Magazine, which publishes extensive restaurant reviews and annual “best of” lists, is primarily funded by advertising from local businesses, including restaurants as well as real estate and construction companies that may have common interests in the gentrification of neighborhoods around downtown San Diego.
To resist food gentrification, therefore, we must contend with these popular narratives that mask social exclusion under the guise of authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and democratic values. In doing so, we must consider the various actors involved in producing the taste of gentrification and the motives behind their efforts. More research on the urban politics of food retail will help bridge the gap between cultural and political-economic explanations of gentrification and identify avenues for resisting social exclusion and spatial displacement.
NOTES
1 1 To preserve the anonymity of Yelp reviewers, who made their comments public but did not explicitly agree to participate in this study, we do not provide identifying reference to any posts quoted in this chapter, except for the name of the restaurant reviewed.
2 2 To obtain consumer data, we used Yelp—the most widely used social media platform where individuals post comments about restaurants. For each of our two study neighborhoods, we downloaded the fifty most recent Yelp reviews for the ten most reviewed restaurants (as of January 25, 2018). Following Zukin et al. (2009), we assume that the most reviewed restaurants are those attracting large numbers of relatively young and affluent consumers. To obtain data from food experts, we downloaded restaurant reviews from a number of popular websites, including the San Diego editions of Eater, Thrillist, and Zagat. These sites are all supported by national media companies that offer similar publications in large cities across the United States and tend to highlight the same type of restaurants. In addition, we gathered data from San Diego Magazine—a lifestyle publication that features the “Best of San Diego”—and the San Diego Brewers’ Guild, which has been actively involved in promoting craft brewing in the region and supporting the “gastropub” and “bar dining” trend. We collected a total of 589 reviews published during a two-year period (2016 and 2017), with a number of popular restaurants reviewed across multiple platforms.
3 3 The categorization of tracts into eligible to gentrify, gentrified, and affluent groups is based on computations using data on median income, property values, proportion of college educated residents, race, and changes in these variables (see Joassart-Marcelli and Bosco 2018b for details). Under this definition, a census tract is considered gentrified if its median income was in the bottom third at the beginning of the period and it experienced a rapid increase in property value, percentage of college educated, and percentage of white residents.
4 4 Using the NVivo qualitative analysis software, we conducted a word frequency analysis of online reviews of the ten most popular restaurants in each neighborhood, relying on Yelp, Eater, Thrillist, Zagat, and San Diego Magazine. Our frequency analysis accounted for words describing the food, eating establishments, and neighborhood environment as well as reviewers’ attitudes toward each of these three. Aided by the software, we filtered our results, excluding proper names and other non-necessary and redundant words, to create word clouds.
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