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Gentrification is commonly understood and studied as an economic and residential phenomenon, with a focus on the displacement of long-term residents as a neighborhood experiences demographic, housing, and commercial transitions. Prominent urban theorists argue that gentrification must be understood fundamentally as a structural process of capitalist urbanization (Harvey 2000; Heynen et al. 2007; Smith 2008 [1982]), in which capital expands through the (re)production of urban space, as guided by city and regional policy (Hackworth and Smith 2001; Smith 2008 [1982]). Gentrification is also a racialized process, predicated on the previous divestment from the urban core that characterized segregation and redlining (Lees, Slater, and Wyly 2008; Shaw 2007).

Gentrification transforms a neighborhood in many ways. Crime rates decrease, real estate markets expand, infrastructure improves, and new businesses and amenities become available. While some long-term residents can benefit from these changes, displacement limits the extent to which they can take advantage of these positive outcomes. Displacement follows the racialized contours of development as low-income communities of color are increasingly subject to police scrutiny at the behest of new residents (Ospina 2015; Shaw 2015) and are pushed out of their homes, at best resettling in less expensive areas and at worst becoming homeless (Applied Survey Research 2015; Slater 2006). But to focus strictly on the residential and commercial realities of this process would be to miss the significant social and cultural dimensions of displacement (Hyra 2008; Ocejo 2011; Zukin 1987, 2009).

In the public eye, the most notable signs of gentrification are changes in amenities and infrastructure, including artisanal coffee shops, brunch-serving cafes, and farm-to-table restaurants. As the vignettes that begin this chapter indicate, food retail and foodways have become flash points signifying whose food matters. For long-term residents, these changes are not simply economic transitions; they signify the loss of their way of life and sense of local ownership. Because food is such a mundane yet vitally multifaceted part of our everyday lives, it can bring together structural and cultural approaches to the processes, consequences, and trajectories of gentrification that are intimately linked in the popular imagination.

Gentrification manifests differently in each urban context, with varying outcomes on its scale, pace, and process (Billingham 2015; Brown-Saracino 2009; Hyra 2008). So, our research uses a comparative approach (Brown-Saracino 2016), employing what Lees (2000) calls the “geography of gentrification” to illuminate differences and similarities across place. As the public awareness of gentrification grows, community activists described in parts III and IV of this volume have begun to engage in organizing efforts to push back against forces that exacerbate historical ethnoracial and class inequalities. In this context, examining how place-specific foodways are valorized, transformed, or lost in the process of promoting and resisting gentrification critically engages with the cultural geography of locality: What is local, who are the locals, and who gets to define these terms? All of which is to say that food offers a means to freshly explore the inherent heterogeneity of gentrification.

Gentrification is now spreading well beyond the major urban centers in North America, occurring in former industrial and mid-size cities. Chapters in this edited volume present cases from many regions of the United States and Canada, including cities typically ignored by gentrification studies such as Durham, Oklahoma City, and Cleveland. Some cities in this volume are post-disaster cities (natural or economic), such as New Orleans and Denver, experiencing gentrification in the context of neoliberal rebuilding and restructuring. That said, by one estimate four of our case cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego) are among the top seven cities that account for half of all gentrification nationally (Richardson, Mitchell, and Franco 2019). Comparing this range of cases reveals local differences, especially when it comes to gentrification’s effect on food security and food sovereignty, while also underscoring similarities in terms of power and resource disparities. Taken together, these chapters exhibit how the politics of place, as well as existing sociocultural institutions, shape the ability to promote and fight gentrification.

Gentrification occurs as a dynamic process rather than as a singular event. The classic “rent gap” model points to the economic rationale that promotes investment to maximize the profit potential of undervalued land (Smith 1979). Policymaking and private investment trends among growth coalitions in the city encourage and justify reinvestment (Logan and Molotch 1987), providing the “institutional scaffolding” for gentrification (Zukin 2016). In contrast to structural explanations, cultural approaches to gentrification examine how the tastes of newcomers encourage and shape investment into formerly underserved neighborhoods. Early gentrifiers are attracted to low-rent areas not only for economic reasons, but also for what they collectively perceive as the authentic cultural significance of these places (Hyra 2017; Ley 2003; Mele 1996). While authenticity is, of course, socially constructed and socially differentiated, new residents tend to attach its heightened significance to dive bars, ethnic markets, or corner stores, regarding them as gritty places with a history (Brown-Saracino 2010; Lloyd 2005).

But newcomers do not just assimilate to the existing community. Some consumption spaces may present themselves as being too authentic and not safe for the newcomers (Grazian 2003), prompting them to develop or redefine the spaces that suit their taste and sensibilities. Boutiquing gentrifiers can displace locally owned businesses that low-income residents have relied on (Zukin 2009), creating what Lloyd (2005) calls a “neo-bohemia” that selectively celebrates the memory of the place. Because food is so intimately connected to culture and place (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2014; DeSoucey 2016; Winsome 1993), many food businesses, such as bars, butcher shops, or distilleries, drive the rearticulation of a community’s identity (Ocejo 2017). For example, the San Diego restaurant Barrio Dogg profiled in chapter 1 draws on the neighborhood’s Latinx history by featuring gourmet, all-beef, “Tijuana-style” hot dogs at a counter built from a low-rider Chevy. But as is common to businesses that attempt to reconstruct authentic visions of a food or place in upscale settings, this restaurant is often perceived by long-term residents as catering to new ones and even tourists, simultaneously gentrifying the neighborhood and the food itself (Gotham 2015; Helm 2017; Ho 2014). chapters 2 and 9 also speak to these dynamics in Durham, North Carolina and Vancouver, Canada. In each case, restaurateurs brand their businesses as “of the community” through their menus and public relations work, but these efforts replicate structural inequalities as newcomers with resources and privileges end up dominating local social change efforts. That said, there are activists in other places that resist newcomers’ vision of the long-term community’s cultural foodscape by actively asserting a collective identity and ownership of their foodways and businesses, as we see in New Orleans and Chicago in chapters 5 and 12.

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.