Critical Sustainability Studies

Food gentrification, a term originally coined by African-American feminist writer Mikki Kendall, is characterized by the appropriation of cultural food items by the market and by mainstream customers, with the risk of increasing food prices and excluding traditional users from purchasing and using those items. More generally, food gentrification illustrates how white middle-class residents immersed in alternative food networks and practices attempt to impose privileged visions of food access, foodscapes, and healthy food at the detriment to minorities and lower-income residents’ right to food-related cultural practices and access to culturally-valuable food. Several of BCNUEJ studies and papers examine the production of food injustice and food privilege in a variety of cities.

• Alternative food provision conflicts in cities: Contesting food privilege, injustice, and whiteness in Jamaica Plain, Boston (Elsevier, Volume 58, January 2015)

• Healthy Food Stores, Greenlining and Food Gentrification: Contesting New Forms of Privilege, Displacement and Locally Unwanted Land Uses in Racially Mixed Neighborhoods (IJURR, Volume 39, Issue 6, November 2016 )

• Study on Gentrification and Food: The Case of Santi-Henri and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce

• A Piece of Land is a Piece of Gold: Stories of Urban Change in Hanoi