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.
Another common focus in 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