How to act as a responsible foodie
How to act as a responsible foodie
We watch a documentary a month for “Econ Extra Credit.” This time it’s “City of Gold,” a celebration of the Los Angeles through the eyes of a noted food writer: the late Jonathan Gold. The LA Times critic made a point of lifting up restaurants and food trucks set up to super-serve the diverse communities that surrounded them. Our Econ Extra Credit newsletter has been exploring these themes all month.
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli is a professor and the director of the food studies program at San Diego State University. She’s written about the economic position of neighborhood, non-chain restaurants. She recently spoke with Marketplace’s David Brancaccio about the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to dining and experiencing new cultures.
David Brancaccio: So this famous restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, who was at the center of this documentary we’re watching this month, once said, “I write about taco stands and fancy French restaurants to try to get people less afraid of their neighbors and to live in their entire city instead of sticking to their one part of town.” What do you make of that principle? If you get people out of their own neighborhoods and experiencing the culture, especially the food of a different part of town, it’s a force for good — would you say yes? Or would you say “yes, but”?
Pascale Joassart-Marcelli: I would say yes, but. I think it’s a wonderful thing and I think that food is really a way to bring people together. Everybody has to eat and why not learn about another culture, learn about other people, be a little adventurous through food? So I think food is an amazing way of bringing people together. But on the other hand, there may be some consequences of our sort of adventurous tastes and our interests in venturing into other neighborhoods to have a unique and exotic experience, and so they are concerns with that. There’s very good things that come out of it, but there are also potentially some negative aspects.
Brancaccio: One is that celebrating more cultures is a good thing, and independent restaurants, often set up to serve the needs of a specific local culture are crucial engines of the economy of a neighborhood. I think you found people who are not local, coming by to eat presumably helps bring dollars to a part of town that might be underserved in a positive category.
Joassart-Marcelli: Right. Yes, that’s definitely one of the positive aspects is that a lot of the restaurants in less visited, lower-income neighborhoods often struggle. And so bringing in extra dollars in these communities is a good thing. The problem is that, what we’ve also noticed is that as people start becoming a little bit more interested in some of these neighborhoods, you have an influx of dollars from the outside in terms of investment, as well. And so the restaurants that are seen as successful — especially from the perspective of so called “foodies,” for lack of a better term, or food critics, in general — are often the ones that are funded by capital from the outside. And these are the restaurants that are more successful in terms of meeting the expectations of outsiders and foodies in terms of maybe what we consider authentic or the type of atmosphere they might enjoy. That extra capital allows these places to attract these newcomers and they often mean that the dollars don’t stay in the community. And they replace, over time, the longtime businesses that originally catered to residents, so we end up with businesses that cater to newcomers, so outsiders, as opposed to serving the community.
Brancaccio: And I think you’ve studied this: It’s not just the outside capital that can lead to an uneven playing field — the well-funded newer restaurants versus the existing restaurants — is some of the existing restaurants may not have the same legal team that can get them the right permits and might not have the same access to the infrastructure they would need to compete.
Joassart-Marcelli: Yes, definitely. That is a big issue is that, in my research, I found that many so called “ethnic food businesses” are very often struggling. And they, for example, have very limited access to capital. Instead of borrowing money through regular channels, they might actually use a credit card to fill gaps in the budget. Or they may mix personal and business finance and pay themselves at the end of the week out of the cash register, depending on what’s left. They may also not pay their workers, especially if they’re family members, including children. So there’s a lot of financial literacy that is needed. But that’s probably not even the most important part. I think a lot of people might have that literacy, but they don’t have access to resources. They don’t have access to loans, they don’t have access to lawyers. They also don’t have access to the media — often that plays a really important role when we’re talking about food culture and restaurants and the success of restaurants.
Brancaccio: That was one of the real contributions of the late critic Jonathan Gold is that he gave some authentic, interesting local restaurants access to what was then the big newspaper in that city, Los Angeles.
Joassart-Marcelli: Yes. And that’s something that’s really important is to give access to the media for all of these small businesses. I think one of the issue though is that, a lot of time, the media tends to focus on the same type of restaurant, where you see different platforms paying attention to one place in one neighborhood, and that becomes kind of the symbol of that neighborhood. And it turns out that half of the time, that place is not really a place that has been in the neighborhood for a long time, but it might be a new restaurant, that might be part of a larger group that just opened one kind of satellite business over there or like a pop-up that comes with capital from somewhere else. And so the media attention tends to be very focused and it’s not necessarily giving a full picture of what is available in a neighborhood. And that often gets reinforced by what’s happening on social media. Social media sort of reinforces what happens in the more traditional media, in the sense that foodies post stories and make comments about very specific places and kind of a select number of places as opposed to the whole neighborhood. So there’s restaurants that have been serving the community for a long time that will be completely ignored by the mainstream media and by social media, because of the audience to whom they’re speaking.
Brancaccio: [That’s the] irony of social media, right? It was supposed to give alternate voices a leg up, to be part of the conversation, but there are crazes that focus on certain restaurants — even on TikTok, right — and that accentuates the problem that you see.
Joassart-Marcelli: Right. And it kind of speaks to the people who are more active on social media. It tends to be, for the most part, primarily educated, middle-class, young, somewhat affluent people who will then, you know, emphasize that perspective and emphasize those kinds of places to which they relate — the kind of places that they want to go visit. And so it doesn’t necessarily represent the perspective of neighborhood residents who may not be on social media.
Brancaccio: This kind of attention can bring money in, as you say — some of it good, some of it bad — but, you know, if the goal is revitalization of a community, lifting up people from the community, that’s presumably a good goal. But you would have concerns if it crosses into that other term: not revitalization, but gentrification.
Joassart-Marcelli: Right. And that’s something that I think it’s important to distinguish: There’s a difference between revitalization, neighborhood Improvement, economic development — all these things that are about injecting money in a neighborhood and making improvement, creating economic growth potentially. All of that is a good thing. The problem is when it turns into gentrification. Gentrification, by definition, is about displacement. So it’s about the transformation of a previously devalued neighborhood into a middle- or upper-class area that is leading to the displacement of longtime residents. So it sort of implies this demographic shift, in which long term residents — typically people of color immigrants, low-income people who tend to be renters — are being replaced by newcomers that tend to be more affluent, have a higher level of formal education, are more likely to be white. And that’s really what gentrification is about. And it seems odd that gentrification would happen through food. Historically, urban scholars have focused on the real estate market and housing, but I think that gentrification is also something that is cultural. And it’s about making a place attractive to the people who have the capital to invest in these places. And food is such an important part of a culture that it actually is playing a role in the process of gentrification — not just in terms of making a place attractive, but also in terms of displacing people. People are being displaced, because the food environment is not what it used to be. They don’t recognize it anymore. They can’t afford the food that is now available. And so food plays a very important active role in this process of gentrification.
Brancaccio: I would say I’m more than a little allergic to the term “foodie.” I kind of break out in hives. So I’ll put it this way: People trying to align their interest in food with making communities better for people who live there. What are some guides that come to mind if you’re trying to essentially explore food in a way that makes the world a better place or a community a better place?
Joassart-Marcelli: I think this it’s important to say that there’s nothing wrong with appreciating food and wanting to explore and wanting to try some small restaurants in neighborhoods that are less typically frequented by so-called foodies. Again, I don’t like that term either. But I can’t think of a better term to sort of describe people whose identity is sort of defined by the appreciation, knowledge, consumption of food. But I think that foodies have a responsibility as well. And they have a responsibility to educate themselves and to reflect on the impacts of the consumption.
I think many of us — I think I can put myself in there — care about where food comes from, how its produced, whether it’s healthy, organic, local, etc., but we’re not always as curious about the people who actually prepare food. So we often think that consuming so-called ethnic food is a good thing to support ethnic businesses, but a lot of time, it has maybe a little bit more to do with optics and maybe even value-signaling than an actual concern with immigrants’ well-being, for example. We don’t really want to know about the hardship of entrepreneurs and workers in the food service industry. That would probably make our meal a little less enjoyable. So we tend to want the cleaned up or the nicely packaged version of the immigrant success story in a food business.
I think we have a responsibility to learn about the history of restaurants, you know, the people behind them, how long they’ve been there, who’s operating them, who’s running them. Have conversations with the people who work there, understand the role of these businesses in their communities, learn from residents — don’t just show up to that one place that you’ve read about somewhere, eat and then leave without really paying attention to the surroundings. Many of these businesses first emerged to serve unmet needs in an area that is often kind of abandoned or left out by mainstream retailers. They also emerged to provide employment opportunities to local residents. And the ones that are drawing the most attention are not necessarily doing that anymore. So we have a responsibility to learn about these things.
I think that’s the best we can do as consumers, is becoming more aware, and, you know, maybe avoiding businesses that are part of the big conglomerates or part of a chain, but really look for the independent businesses that are locally owned, that might even be a worker co-op, or that hires local residents. Try to learn about these things. I know it’s not very easy and it’s kind of awkward to ask these kinds of questions, but maybe we have a responsibility to do that.
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