UC Berkeley

Over the past two decades, the connection between food consumption, health and inequality has increasingly been the focus of scholarly and public debate. Scholars have been especially interested in interrogating how the neighborhood-level built food environment shapes people’s food consumption and procurement practices. While scholars agree that low-income neighborhoods tend to have less access to grocery stores and higher rates of food related health disparities, scholars disagree on how exactly differential access translates into people’s daily food consumption practices or differences in health. Therefore, researchers and public health policy makers have called for more comprehensive investigations of the local food environment, the sociocultural factors that contribute to everyday food consumption practices, and how structural and sociocultural factors work together to produce stratified patterns of food consumption.

In this dissertation, I investigate how race, class and place shape food consumption and procurement practices for residents who reside in two neighborhoods in Oakland, California: the Oasis, a multi-racial, class diverse urban neighborhood with a variety of grocery stores and restaurants within a 1-mile radius; and the Turf, an inner city, Black and Hispanic neighborhood with a high concentration of poverty and no grocery stores within a 1-mile radius. I argue that to understand how neighborhood shapes food consumption practices, we must look beyond food access and cost and also consider what I call local logics of accomplishment – belief systems constructed in relation to the opportunities, constraints, and resulting interaction orders of local environments around what constitutes accomplished daily practice.

Amongst mounting fears of unclean, unsafe, disease-producing food, respondents across neighborhoods expressed a desire to regularly eat “clean,” fresh, and home cooked food purchased in places where they felt cared for. However, socioeconomic status, racial group membership, and neighborhood mediated respondent's ability to do this successfully. In the middle-class neighborhood of the Oasis where care, beauty and abundance were prominent, respondents measured the value of their practices against their aspirations to easily eat fresh, local, “clean” and ethically produced foods while distancing themselves from food practices associated with need. They therefore felt accomplished when they both could purchase and desire to eat fresh foods from day-to-day. In the poor neighborhood of the Turf where neglect, abandonment, and struggle characterized daily life, respondents measured the value of their daily food consumption practices against the abject conditions of poverty. They therefore felt accomplished when they were able to either survive within this struggle or create any modicum of space between their practices and these abject conditions.

I illustrate how these local logics of accomplishment with regards to food and eating elicit positive and negative emotions for respondents. I also show how people engage in both positive and corrective emotion-work to manage these emotions from day-to-day. I argue that, approximating these food related health aspirations and distancing from the abject conditions of poverty was externalized through capitalism as a game in which people received emotional and symbolic rewards or penalties. These emotional rewards and penalties resulted in respondents experiencing their ability to align their practices with their aspirations not simply as a result of an objectively exploitative social structure and its patterns of domination but rather as an internal and individual quality of the self. I argue that this works to mystify and reproduce stratified patterns of food consumption.

I organize these ideas into five empirical chapters based on five relationships to food and eating that emerged during my fieldwork – relationships of ease, struggle, and distress constructed against eating aspirations in the Oasis; relationships of survival and accomplishment constructed against abject conditions of poverty in the Turf. I conclude by suggesting that neighborhood, race, and class matter not just for what people can purchase among alternatives, but also for what people feel they can accomplish with regards to their health through food. Further, what people feel they can accomplish impacts both their practices and how they feel about their practices. The implications of these findings for public health policy on food related health disparities are considered.