Put Those Collards Down. You People Are Gentrifying Greens.

Since the beginning of January, Whole Foods has been screaming it from their Facebook pages, corporate blog, news affiliates, and tastefully designed signage: “Collards are the new kale!” While at first glance this just seems like a flash-in-the-pan and downright lazy line of ad copy, its casual, trend-focused language raised red flags among some people. When Mikki Kendall, a Black feminist and writer who tweets as Karnythia, began riffing on the laughable idea of Whole Foods and their customers “discovering” a vegetable that had been a staple of working class Black and White Southern Americans’ meals for centuries,the hashtag #foodgentrification was born.

(Is this the right time to point out that the linked article was written by a woman named Ho and published in Bitch Media? I thought you might want to know, because it seems like life often imitates The Onion.)

What all of this adds up to is a massive PR campaign aimed at rebranding collard greens, divorcing the vegetable from its working class and indigenous affiliations to place it squarely within the culinary crosshairs of the same massive gourmet health food apparatus that turned acai berries, quinoa, tofu, and chia seeds into “superfoods.” Though the health benefits of such foods are well-documented, their trendiness within majority populations tends to result in a generally unhealthy outcomes for their cultures of origin. The tendency takes the form of a curious kind of reacharound logic wherein economic and racial minorities are castigated for eating “primitively” and “unhealthily” while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class as “exotic” delicacies. As a result, the price of that food item inflates to meet the surge in mainstream demand for it.

What is "reacharound logic"?  Anyone care to hazard a guess, because the author leaves us not a clue as to its meaning.

Nor does she provide examples of racial minorities being "castigated for eating "primitively" and "unhealthily" while their traditional foods are cherry picked for use by the upper class...".  Does she refer to criticism of the junk foods bought by people receiving governmental aid?  That is not isolated to any one racial group, although perhaps in her mind there is only one racial minority.  No, wait, she references working class "white" and "black" southern Americans.  Working class, that convenient catch-all for people in an undescribed demographic.  Everyone who has a job is working class, am I right?


I have visions of upper class people in top hats and carrying canes, walking through the produce section of a grocery store with cherry pickers in their hands, carefully selecting the best produce previously purchased only by working class members.

The central and sustaining drive behind the #foodgentrification conversation is an overwhelming sense of fear: fear of being unable to feed one's family, of losing access to traditional foods, of being priced out of toxin-free produce, of one's food being alternately shamed and fetishized depending on commercial whims, of having one's history repackaged and sold. It comes down to a waiting game; many of the participants in this conversation voiced resignation over the possibility that their food would be next.

Reading that made my head hurt.  I took two Bayer aspirins, medicine appropriated from a German company and repackaged and sold at whim.

There is a warning of bad things already happening in the gentrification of collards.  Blame the hipsters and yuppies.

The apparatus has already been put into full swing: customers are already pre-registering for collard cooking classes, cashiers are already wearing “Collards are the New Kale!” buttons on their aprons, derivative blog posts are already queued up for publication, and trend analysts are surely already mapping out the apex of the greens’ cultural trajectory.

Apparatus.  Pre-registering.  Classes. Buttons on cashiers' aprons.  Derivative blog posts.  Mapping out the apex.  It's a war, sounds like.  The war on collard buyers who aren't working class white and black southern people.

And finally, Ms. Ho gets to the big finish.

If anything, the crucial importance of  #foodgentrification lies in the way it enables participants to expose a particular piece of economic inequality that operates with a glossy, do-gooder façade. It’s difficult to avoid feeling like you’re not complicit in systems of food insecurity after reading through the hashtag, and the questions that it raises are ones that we should have been asking ourselves a long time ago, well before it got to tofu, then acai, then kale, then collards.

There we are, economic inequality.  Bingo.  Somehow the increase in demand for collards resulting in more acres of collards under cultivation and more jobs created by the increased planting, tending, harvesting, cleaning, wrapping, packaging and shipping of collards doesn't fit into the reacharound logic.

Even though most of those new jobs are likely held by minorities.

Thank you, Ms. Ho, and best wishes in your pursuit of an MFA.