Black Placemaking Through Food: Embodying and Envisioning Systems of Care

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Geographies

Abstract

This study examines how Black women in Boston’s historically Black neighborhoods, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, navigate and transform racially uneven food landscapes. Situated within urban scholarship on racial capitalism, slow violence, Black geographies, and food apartheid, I position everyday food practices as Black placemaking grounded in care and informed by Du Bois’ double consciousness. Drawing on sixteen semi-structured interviews and survey data, I conceptualize participants’ experiences through three analytic categories: actual, preferred, and imagined foodways. Actual foodways describe strategies enacted under structural constraint, including multi-stop grocery trips, extended travel for culturally-specific or higher-quality foods, and price comparison routines. Such practices expose the slow violence of supermarket redlining, gentrification, and uneven urban development while demonstrating strategic agency. Preferred foodways foreground culturally meaningful practices such as preparing family recipes, patronizing Black-owned markets, organizing grocery carpools, and informally distributing and sharing meals. These practices constitute relational infrastructures of care through which space becomes meaningful place, extending Black placemaking scholarship by identifying care as its operative mechanism. Imagined foodways express community-controlled and culturally relevant food futures, including transparent distribution systems and neighborhood-based food spaces rooted in social connection. Engaging Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, I conceptualize participants’ structural awareness as analytic and imaginative capacity. They have the ability to call out racialized inequities while practicing and imagining alternative systems rooted in care. Taking these findings together, I position Black women’s small-scale, care-based food strategies as a form of micro food sovereignty as they cultivate nutrition, cultural belonging, and imaginative possibility within wounded urban landscapes. Thus, the blueprints for healing cities are already being embodied and envisioned through Black women’s everyday food labor.

Author

• Victoria Fuller, Boston College