Ingredients for Displacement: An Exploration of the Role of Street Food Advocates in San Francisco’s Changing Environment

This paper draws on a case study of street food vending in San Francisco, California, to explore how the actions of street food advocates – who first helped vendors gain rights and legitimacy – also advanced their displacement. The ways in which street food vending has been losing space, both culturally and materially, are analyzed in three directions: (1) claiming rights and creating places; (2) falling prey to urban boosters; (3) shifting cultural capital and geographies. The study calls for an updated understanding of how street food vending operates in fast-changing environments and addresses how oppositional and alternative food initiatives may serve as part of a wider neoliberal strategy. In San Francisco, the ways in which advocates and operators spatialize street food have provided an unusual frontier space for exclusion and displacement. The paper thus contributes to emergent research on local food initiatives and their survivability practices in gentrifying North American cities.