Gourmet and the Ghetto
My Article on the Foodification of Rome's Historic Jewish Quarter, for issue 23.3 of Gastronomica
I am using today’s newsletter to share something unusual: some professional news. Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, has just published the free-to-read version of a journal article based on my fieldwork last year in Rome. It will be paywall-free for about a month, and then the permanent link will move here; if it doesn’t work for you, let me know.
My article explores something I had noticed in many places, but I didn’t have a name for it until I started researching restaurant scenes in Italian city centres. Foodification — a term exported from Brooklyn, but refined in Italy — is when a residential or mixed-commercial neighbourhood becomes dominated by food businesses. Ask anyone who has lived in the same large city for a long time — not just in Italy — and they could probably tell you about a place where there used to be “all sorts of businesses”, but now you can’t move for restaurants.
My article explores how this has happened in Rome’s former Jewish Ghetto in the twenty-first century. The area has also experienced touristification and gentrification, which are not unrelated, but describe subtly different things. Already wealthy neighbourhoods can be foodified, too, and foodification doesn’t always rely on tourism alone. I hope the article shows not just how the area has been foodified, but also gives some explanations for why the restaurant scene has developed in the way it has. Like gentrification, foodification also has local characteristics, determined by a neighbourhood’s heritage and its present-day character.
I could keep summarising the article, but I want to avoid typing our the whole thing again, so I would love for you to take a read instead.
I had always wanted to write for Gastronomica, one of my favourite journals: not just because it has some of the best food scholarship around, but also because it puts such an emphasis on being readable and interesting. It’s a journal that knows there are people outside academia who want to read research into food, and doesn’t regard them as a secondary audience. I’m very proud to have published in issue 23.3 alongside so many brilliant food researchers.