We Need to Talk About Food & Gentrification
Because collards are the new kale and sometimes community gardens make things worse.
A new fast-casual sandwich spot opened up in my neighborhood recently, and although I had followed its progress on social media for awhile, it was hard to feel excited about its arrival.
"Why did they have to call it Bodega??" I complained to my husband. "It's so clueless."
The neighborhood where I live, in Northwest Denver, once widely known as the Northside, was for a long time a center of political strength and cultural pride for Mexican Americans living in Denver. Currently, it is a gentrification hotspot, a place where demographics have shifted swiftly toward whiter and wealthier homebuyers, where longtime residents are being displaced, their houses razed and replaced with multi-million-dollar newly built homes, or renovated tastefully by developers before being sold at a considerable markup. Recently Denver Public Schools announced that one of the neighborhood elementary schools, where 88% of students are Black or Hispanic, will be one of the ten schools the district is planning on closing, due to low enrollment.
In that context, there is something just cringe about a white chef and owner1 naming his "chef-driven" sandwich concept for the Spanish-language term for a cultural institution which in many Black and brown communities is the only place to purchase groceries in the neighborhood, and as such stands as a daily reminder of widespread food apartheid in this country—because no matter how well stocked, no bodega will have the freshness and bounty of a suburban Walmart, or an urban Whole Foods. Often the bulk of their business is in liquor and cigarettes.
I say all this as a gentrifier myself. I am not from Denver. I am not Latina. My household's income is above the city's median. I'm not trying to call out this chef, or saying anyone should boycott his restaurant.2 This is not about the individual actions of any one restaurateur; it's about how in cities around the world, food and gentrification have a close and complicated relationship, and it is one worth thinking about critically.
When Collards Are the New Kale
Food gentrification was first discussed by Black feminist writer Mikki Kendall, in a 2014 Twitter thread reacting to a Whole Foods "Collards are the new kale" campaign. She tweeted:
When we talk about #foodgentrification we’re talking about the impact of a traditionally low income food becoming trendy
and
Black Americans have been told relentlessly soul food was to blame for obesity. Now collards are the new kale #foodgentrification
More than eight years later, this type of food gentrification is alive and well on menus across the country, and around the world. Food gentrification reframes a food that is an affordable, familiar form of sustenance for members of a particular culture into an often unrecognizable form that is elevated, carefully sourced, reinvented, healthier—take your pick of adjectives that connote the original is cheap, unhealthy, trashy food.
This process has a lot in common with the gentrification of cities, the cycle of economic disinvestment and decline, often in neighborhoods shaped by redlining and racial covenants, followed by a "reinvention" and economic "revitalization" that often transforms communities into unrecognizable and unaffordable spaces for longtime residents.
I'm thinking about Nashville hot chicken sandwiches, created in and popular throughout Black communities in Nashville for decades before the city's restaurants were desegregated, and now a hot "concept" for chefs and their investors around the country, who apparently lack an exciting culinary culture of their own. Alongside the frequent "reinvention" of the sandwich—I recently ate a vegan version, made from a mushroom—the city of Nashville has been "reinvented," as a playground for bachelorette parties, a country music tourist fantasyland.
The inimitable Tunde Wey pointed out the connection between food and gentrification in his 2018 Hot Chicken Shit dining event, where he served his Nigerian version of hot chicken in a Baptist church in North Nashville, a historically Black neighborhood. Black diners from the area were served for free and white diners were charged $100 for one piece of chicken, $1000 for four pieces, and the deed to a property in North Nashville (or its equivalent value) for an entire chicken. The goal was to accumulate land in a community land trust, with the intention of building affordable housing, and halting the displacement of as many North Nashville residents as possible. As with all of Wey's work, it also sparked conversation—and made me laugh a little at the brazenness of it all. I love this quote from his profile in GQ:
Eventually the man at the head of the table speaks: "My name is Tunde Wey. I am Nigerian. I am a cook. I am here trying to sell chicken for enormous amounts of money.” The plan, he goes on, is to thus end gentrification. There is laughter around the table. “I know,” he says, smiling. “But the problem is outrageous. I thought I'd come up with an equally outrageous plan to fix it.”
When the Solution Becomes the Problem
Another aspect of this problematic relationship between food and gentrification occurs when changes to the food landscape trigger or hasten the gentrification of a neighborhood. CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute includes a number of examples in its report, Feeding or Starving Gentrification: The Role of Food Policy.
Supermarket "greenlining" is the practice of bringing supermarkets with "health and environmental halos" into gentrifying neighborhoods, signaling to higher income shoppers that they are ethical businesses who value the neighborhoods where they are located, often by stocking locally-produced food items, typically at a higher price point. This is very appealing to those wealthier, younger, whiter residents who gentrify a neighborhood—while low-income residents are left without affordable and welcoming places to purchase groceries.
(I am cringing again because you know what is across the street from Bodega? A grocery store called Leevers Locavore that specializes in locally-grown and -produced fruits and vegetables, meat, and food products. You can't make this stuff up! Unless you write for Portlandia!)3
But the most ironic and infuriating example is when assets like community gardens, established by food advocates to increase food justice and sovereignty for low-income BIPOC residents, become selling points for real estate agents working in "up and coming" neighborhoods.
Alison Alkon and Josh Cadji wrote extensively about this phenomenon, an aspect of "green gentrification"—the addition of green spaces to neighborhoods which make them more appealing to more affluent potential residents—in their paper about food justice and gentrification in Oakland, CA.
Food justice organizations create spaces, including farmers’ markets, community gardens, cafés and health food stores, that—despite missions to serve long-term communities—appeal to the tastes of new residents and signal to developers and other urban boosters that the neighborhood is ripe for redevelopment.
It is not only a signal to developers; the paper also cites a conversation with John and Joice, Black residents of Portland who were interviewed for Matt Hern's book, What a City Is For: Remaking the Politics of Displacement:
John: I knew Black people were fucked as soon as I saw the bike lanes. That's when we knew Black people weren't welcome here anymore…
Joice: And the community gardens. That's another bad sign for the African American community. We always gardened. We always shared our gardens and our food. We didn't need ‘community gardens’. That's a white invention.
Alkon and Cadji point out that food organizations which are purely entrepreneurial are more likely to contribute to green gentrification, as they ultimately must answer to the needs of the more affluent residents whose purchases pay their bills. Advocacy, policy work, and actively fighting gentrification in the neighborhoods the organizations serve can push back against organizational complicity.
CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute's previously mentioned report concludes with a list of ten strategies to resist food gentrification, many of which are centered on the hyper-local: paying attention to local food policy and zoning regulations, participating in neighborhood planning meetings, supporting organizations fighting for affordable housing, and lobbying city agencies involved in economic development.
If you are in the US, the upcoming election will undoubtedly ask you to vote on local measures—will any of them potentially affect food or housing policies where you live? Can you find a way to resist food gentrification, instead of becoming complicit? I hope so. I really do.
Although not directly cited, Joshua Sbicca’s “Food, Gentrification, and the Changing City” also inspired this essay. Sbicca, Alison Alkon, and Yuki Kato edited a book of essays about food and gentrification, called A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City.
Chef-owner of Bodega, if you are reading this, I am happy to have a conversation about any of this anytime. I would be happy to do the kind of work with you that I did with food entrepreneurs and restaurant owners in New Orleans, figuring out how to operationalize racial equity in your business. Truly, this essay is not meant as a call-out, but a call-in.
I actually got over my cringe and tried it! I found the space pleasant, the servers kind, and the sandwiches tasty. I still felt embarrassed for the name.
