While traveling in Italy this past fall, I found myself examining not only the cuisine of the place around me, but also a place 4,000 miles away. The question incessantly popped in my head: “What is American cuisine?” It’s a question I struggled to answer when my Italian hosts prompted me over dinner, and a question that instinctively made me cringe with its stereotypical answer – hamburgers, chicken fingers, french fries (in short, fast food) – one that I, as an American, do not identify with. While believing this stereotype as misrepresentative and just plain false, I still wasn’t sure what the alternative was: if this most certainly is not our culinary identity, then what is?

My instinct in addressing a complex entity is to return to the roots, and in the case of food, these roots take on a literal sense. I believe our culinary identity lies within our tie to agriculture, but when we look deeper into our history with food and the ground beneath it, we realize that our relationship as Americans with the land is complicated. The modern day farm-to-table, sustainable food movement aims to heal that connection, but in doing so, it also seems to alienate the minority populations that made it possible. Can a nation’s identity really be its identity if it inherently excludes those who formed it? And how can we work to prevent this alienation so that marginalized low-income and immigrant communities can also benefit from the organic, local, and sustainable movement, rather than being forced to rely on the convenience of cheap, low-quality calories?

California, the birthplace of the organic movement, offers an example of this complex identity. Author Mina Holland in The World on a Plate addresses the legitimacy of the term “Californian cuisine,” wondering if the term itself is “culinary plagiarism” as the cuisine “flagrantly used the dishes and traditions of more established cuisines,” i.e. the immigrant populations that first inhabited California. By that same line of logic, the cuisine of an immigrant-formed America could also be considered culinary plagiarism but, as she argues, all cuisines are derivatives: “[Californian cuisine] parades richness, diversity and possibility of the New World and gives the concept of the American ‘melting pot’ edible expression, bringing together the disparate influences of its immigrant communities onto one plate.” Despite being derived, Californian cuisine does have a distinct identity, one that “prioritizes local and seasonal produce,” forging the organic movement which has “changed the way we eat irreversibly, epitomizing how we want to cook and eat now: fresh, healthy, with a touch of rebelliousness.” This culinary identity – one that is reflective of where we are, what is in season, and the communities that have created it – is an agricultural one, and one that extends to greater America.

But it is not enough to justify a culinary identity by acknowledging what formed it: a nation’s culinary identity, in order to remain sustainable, must continue to pay homage to its roots while also reflecting the communities that currently inhabit it. Although environmentally sustainable, the current organic food movement poses a problem for food sovereignty, defined by Carlo Petrini in Slow Food Nations: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair as “the people’s right to choose what kind of agriculture they practice, how they eat, and how much they eat, in accordance with their economic potential and the traditional knowledge they possess.”

I need look no further than a block away from my previous apartment to highlight this point. The Whole Foods I frequented in my Jamaica Plain neighborhood was the subject of controversy when back in 2011 it replaced Hi-Lo, a local Latino supermarket. The surrounding community, historically Boston’s Latin Quarter, was heart-broken, saying that the replacement marked the “removal of the heart of the community’s culture” and was “an attack on their food sovereignty” (Anguelovski, 2015). They felt they lost their right to affordable, culturally appropriate food, and were left out of the conversation. The opening of Whole Foods in this particular spot, although aiming to increase access to organic foods, ignored the identity of the community, catering instead to its increasingly gentrified population, and simply put “did not translate into the provision of healthy affordable food for people of color.”

Anguelovski’s article highlights a key point that “the groups most at risk of food insecurity – people of color and low-income groups – are mostly absent within the alternative food movement.” Reasons why are numerous and complex, a few being a lack of “the capacity to purchase goods from those networks” or because of a more complicated dynamic of feeling “invisible as [minorities] navigate white spaces.”

Irene Li, co-founder of the Chinese-American “Mei Mei Street Kitchen” which won Boston’s Most Sustainable Restaurantaward in 2018, reflects on this difficulty in a recent WBUR article by example of the hold Italian food has had on the city’s restaurant scene for years: “Its dominance in our local market is the result of a complex set of historical social inequalities…Why do we balk at a $15 bowl of pho and covet a $24 spaghetti carbonara? What would it take for Thai or Ethiopian or Trinidadian cuisine to develop the multiplicity of expressions that Italian cuisine enjoys?” Restaurants exemplify this exclusivity, where “from the beginning, gastronomy had a markedly elitist connotation” (Slow Food Nation, 2015).

As a result of this exclusivity, lower-income and minority populations not only cannot access fresh, healthy food at their local supermarket, they also cannot see their cuisine fully celebrated in the greater food industry. Anguelovski ends her investigation with a question that hits at the problematic nature of sustainable American cuisine at its core: “How can we foster greater food diversity without creating exclusion, food privilege, and environmental gentrification at the expense of historically vulnerable groups and people of color whose place in the city is traditionally under threat?”

Solutions are as diverse as the people they aim to help, with movements like Boston’s “Black Restaurant Challenge” championed by Li as a way to increase “visibility and equitable representation” by encouraging diners to visit black-owned establishments, and the pop-up model employed by Devonn Francis at NYC’s Yardy, whose migrating restaurant allows him to “reach into different cultures and communicate with people on their own terms, in their own spaces” (Food & Wine).

But the most tangible method to avoid exclusivity seems to again go back to the roots: the desire – and necessity to strengthen our relationship with the land is something that connects us all, and should thus rightly define American cuisine. Succinctly put by Drawdown founder John Foley, “Farms have a special place in Americans’ hearts—they’re part of our culture, our heritage, our ethos as a nation” (Civil Eats).

It is thus essential to address that, when our organic and local food movement excludes minorities, we “fail to understand the deeper role played by land and food for historically marginalized groups” (Anguelovski, 2015). Because for many, the land was what society centered around, such as the Native Americans from which “we have lost a priceless heritage of knowledge” (Slow Food Nation, 2015); for others like the African Americans, relationship with the land was sacred, one that “far surpasses our 246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping” (Civil Eats). It is ironic that those who have had the least contact with the land have historically dictated the American food system, as with the invention of industrial agriculture the white man “destroyed the possibility of meaningful contact with the earth… Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty” (The Hidden Wound, 1970).

So where do we go from here? Carlo Petrini emphasizes in Slow Food Nation that we need “a new sustainable agriculture that respects both old traditions and modern technologies (for the new technologies are not bad in themselves; it all depends on how one uses them)”. The alternative food movement is not bad, it just depends on how we use it, and how we use it must include those who have formed it but have historically have been left out. This is especially apparent given the defining role land has played in these communities’ lives, and the collective loss felt when that close connection was broken in rural-urban migration.

Finding ways to reconnect people with the land is necessary if the farm-to-table ideal is to be inclusive. Civil Eats recently covered a story on a New York-based summer program where black students visited black-owned farms focused on food justice. Upon feeling the earth with his own two hands, one student reflected: “I leave this experience feeling grounded like a tree in a land and country that I previously did not feel welcomed in. Connection with soil was the awakening of my sovereignty.”

We cannot justly define American cuisine as farm-to-table, sustainable, or agricultural if we create a food system that denies an equal say to the immigrants and minority groups that have formed the roots of our society through their relationship with the land. Cuisines are formed by humble beginnings, often out of necessity personified by these immigrants, and thus an agricultural gastronomy is inherently non-elitist. We can bring this to life by acknowledging that, just as it is necessary to nourish the roots of the crops that end up on our plates to create an environmentally sustainable food system, it is necessary to nourish the roots of our culture to create an equitable food system.

Bibliography

“31 Makers We Love.” Food & Wine,22 Feb. 2019, www.foodandwine.com/cooking-techniques/meet-the-makers. Anguelovski, Isabelle. “Alternative Food Provision Conflicts in Cities: Contesting Food Privilege, Injustice, and

Whiteness in Jamaica Plain, Boston.” Geoforum, vol. 58, 2015, pp. 184–194., doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.014. “As Awareness Grows About Food’s Role In Climate Change, What Solutions Exist?” Civil Eats, Civil Eats, 21 Feb.

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Holland, Mina. The World On A Plate: 40 Cuisines, 100 Recipes, and The Stories Behind Them. Penguin, 2015 .
Li, Irene. “What The Boston Black Restaurant Challenge Brings To Our City.” WBUR,WBUR, 4 Feb. 2019, http://www.wbur.org/artery/2019/02/04/boston-black-restaurant-challenge.

Li, Irene. “What The Boston Black Restaurant Challenge Brings To Our City.” WBUR,WBUR, 4 Feb. 2019, http://www.wbur.org/artery/2019/02/04/boston-black-restaurant-challenge.

Penniman, Leah. “By Reconnecting With Soil, We Heal the Planet and Ourselves.” Civil Eats, Civil Eats, 19 Feb. 2019, civileats.com/2019/02/18/by-reconnecting-with-soil-we-heal-the-planet-and-ourselves.

Petrini, Carlo. Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair. Rizzoli, 2015.

“Sustainable Business of the Year Awards.” Sustainable Business Network of Massachusetts,sbnmass.org/programs/sustainable-business-of-the-year-awards/.