Food and Gentrification

Gentrification is a process of neighborhood change. The term gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964, when she described how formerly working-class London neighborhoods were being transformed by an influx of middle-class professionals. The term was first applied to neighborhood transformations in postindustrial cities of the Global North, but its use has broadened to account for other areas, such as cities in the Global South and rural communities, where higher-income people are moving to places inhabited by lower-income populations. Over the last several decades, gentrification has become a major force in reshaping cities—physically, culturally, socially, and economically. The gentrification literature has duly expanded to consider numerous aspects of the gentrification process, its causes and consequences, and its particular manifestations in different places. Prior to 2000, little of this work considered the ways that gentrification involves food, but such connections have started to gain more attention, especially since the mid-2010s, paralleling the expansion of the “food justice” literature concerned with social inequalities in the food system. As the connections between food and gentrification are becoming clearer, so too are the complexities of the gentrification process and the place-based nature of food. Scholars of gentrification have long debated whether the process is explained by production (that is, capturing unrealized value through property improvements) or consumption (reflecting how middle- and upper-class people desire to experience the city); those who study food and gentrification often integrate both explanations in their work. Scholars who study food and gentrification are also advancing an understanding of food’s multidimensional significance as sustenance, symbol, commodity, experience, and identity. The bulk of scholarship at the intersections of food and gentrification can be thought of in two broad categories: the relationship between gentrification and changing food retail environments, and the ways that alternative food initiatives such as community gardens are threatened by, contribute to, or resist gentrification. This article addresses these two areas in detail, and then briefly surveys research on other intersections, such as longtime residents’ experience of changing food environments, the impacts of gentrification on public health, and the impact of rural gentrification on food systems.