Recipe for Gentrification

Honorable Mention, 2021 Edited Collection Book Award, given by the Association for the Study of Food and Society How gentrification uproots the urban food landscape, and what activists are doing to resist itFrom hipster coffee shops to upscale restaurants, a bustling local food scene is perhaps the most commonly recognized harbinger of gentrification. A Recipe for Gentrification explores this widespread phenomenon, showing the ways in which food and gentrification are deeply—and, at times, controversially—intertwined. Contributors provide an inside look at gentrification in different cities, from major hubs like New York and Los Angeles to smaller cities like Cleveland and Durham. They examine a wide range of food enterprises—including grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, and farmers’ markets—to provide up-to-date perspectives on why gentrification takes place, and how communities use food to push back against displacement. Ultimately, they unpack the consequences for vulnerable people and neighborhoods. A Recipe for Gentrification highlights how the everyday practices of growing, purchasing and eating food reflect the rapid—and contentious—changes taking place in American cities in the twenty-first century.

The authors in this collection not only make a significant contribution to food studies but also create an important and much needed place for food within the scholarship on urban planning and gentrification ... This book should be on the shelves of every trendy coffee shop or bookstore in the neighborhoods examined in this volume, or anywhere in the country that people gather in places made possible at great expense to others because of what gentrification has wrought., This book cleverly weaves together a wide range of ways in which food intersects with gentrification, while the complex issues explored are made accessible to a broad audience. A Recipe for Gentrification will be of interest to food justice scholars and activists; urban researchers and planners; as well as community organizers, small business owners, and allies who seek to deepen their understanding of their own implications in processes of gentrification and social justice., The book remains an exciting and tangible exploration of the topics of social justice, urban agriculture, community capacity building, and the right to the city. It can be recommended as an equally engaging entry point for any one of them., In a short time, food—what we consume and how we consume it, how it's made, where it comes from and how it gets transported—has gone from a frivolous topic for social science research to a significant one. Urban scholars have been paying attention. By looking at actual city spaces, this volume tackles the important issue of the link between food and where we live. Specifically, these chapters address how the ways that food gets made, purchased, and eaten are intertwined with processes of gentrification, giving us a new lens for understanding this complicated form of urban change. Displacement, inequality, community conflict, development policy, and resistance, among many other critical issues, receive insightful analyses from researchers studying an array of food-related activities in several North American cities. Food's implications in and for gentrification is a focus whose time has come, and luckily we now have this volume to start the conversation., These valuable studies show how food has become the cultural frontier of urban change. From urban farms to farmers’ markets, interactions between food and place empower gentrification but also enable resistance to it. Alerting us to the slippery slope from appropriation to dispossession, the authors make the crucial point that the city’s authenticity depends on diversity more than on good taste.

Alison Hope Alkon (Editor) Alison Hope Alkon is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Pacific. She is co-editor of The New Food Activism and Cultivating Food Justice and author of Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race and the Green Economy.Yuki Kato (Editor) Yuki Kato is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. She is the co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City.Joshua Sbicca (Editor) Joshua Sbicca is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. He is the author of Food Justice Now!: Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle.