5. From the Holy Trinity to Microgreens: Gentrification Redefining Local Foodways in Post- Katrina New Orleans

Urban Farm DB summary

This chapter examines the gentrification of foodways in post-Katrina New Orleans, combining the author's own experience as a long-term urban gardener with grower interviews. It argues that the emerging narrative presenting urban agriculture as a new idea obscures the city's long-standing tradition of local food production and procurement, and that the new geographic notion of local tends to dissociate from the social and cultural dimensions of preexisting folk foodways; it concludes that the popularity of urban agriculture among newcomers, though well-intended, had the adverse effect of discouraging many long-term residents from engaging with urban agriculture and from opportunities such as entrepreneurship, community health and urban sustainability.