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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) capital to these places (Ramírez 2015; Reese 2019). We demonstrate that food influences the urbanization of neoliberalism, the process through which cities become increasingly central to elite accumulation of capital (Pinson and Morel Journel 2016), and the racialization of everyday life for new and long-term urban residents (Alkon and Cadji 2018; Egerer and Fairbain 2018; McClintock 2018; Sbicca and Myers 2017). Several of the chapters in this volume (4, 5, 8, 13, 14) highlight that underdevelopment has created opportunities for communities to reclaim space through urban agriculture, who then struggle to maintain these spaces as land values escalate. Other chapters (2, 3, 9) describe how cities encourage and celebrate local food and new food retail as evidence of their revitalization, which often brings devastating consequences for historically rooted communities of color. Each of these analyses examines the ways that food impacts and is impacted by the racialized processes of development and neglect.

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 the urban, northern counterpart to the history of corporate land grabs across the global South (Williams and Holt-Giménez 2017). There is also localized resistance to these pressures. Long-term residents under threat of displacement, such as those profiled in chapters 10, 11, and 13, are often very attached to their gardens and are willing to fight for their right to the city. We have grouped these stories at the end of the book, as they inspire us to think through how food activism can lead to new ways to oppose displacement.

Just as these stories connect food activism to struggles for housing, a final important reason for discussing gentrification and food together is to link the essential human needs for shelter and sustenance. This can nuance the study of food in new ways. While what we eat reflects political economy, culture, and taste, so too does housing (Lees et al. 2008), and both are fundamentally rooted in access to land and place (Williams and Holt-Giménez 2017). Current patterns of returning to the city provide an opportunity to interrogate how people experience changing economic, political, and social conditions. For example, looking at gentrification through the lens of food identifies pressing biopolitical connections between bodies, health, and the built environment. The slow violence (Nixon 2011) of living in a place with little food access only to be uprooted through the violence of gentrification connects directly to inequalities in race and income that privilege white and rich bodies who can actualize their tastes beyond bodily need (Guthman 2011; Hatch 2016).

In sum, studying the intersections between food and gentrification has much to offer. In contrast to a food systems perspective, this volume calls for examining food vis-à-vis wider social processes, particularly ethnoracial and economic inequalities. Second, because food businesses are material evidence of gentrification, while particular foods have become symbolic of this form of urban development, gentrification provides a means to integrate political economy and cultural approaches to the study of food. More practically, attention to gentrification shows the limitations of contemporary food politics. As urban boosters and food entrepreneurs orient their projects toward new residents of gentrifying cities, proponents of alternative food systems are at best unwittingly implicated in the displacement of long-term communities. This becomes particularly ironic when projects were designed for or even by long-term community members in order to augment their access to fresh food. Last, interrogating the relationship between food and gentrification provides an opportunity to better link struggles for food justice to other movements for social justice. This is happening with regard to indigenous food sovereignties, prison abolition, water rights, the Movement for Black Lives, workers’ rights, and immigrant rights (Alkon and Guthman 2017; Daigle 2019; Minkoff-Zern 2019; Myers forthcoming; Movement for Black Lives n.d.; Reese 2019; Reynolds and Cohen 2016; Sbicca 2018; White 2018). In our conclusion, we highlight some ways that food movements are joining the struggles for tenants’ rights and against displacement.