After moving back to Milwaukee, my home city, last year and eating my newly non-vegan way through a few of the “greener” restaurants, I started to wonder who else pondered a few obvious things: Why…

“And what does it mean when the tagline of a white-owned restaurant is something like “Modern Mexican Cuisine”? What does it mean when that restaurant charges three times more for enchiladas than the family-owned place down the street that has been there for 25 years? It means that “modern” equals white, and that “ethnic” equals antiquated and dirty. These restaurants cater to privileged people who are scared of leaving their comfortable zone but want to feel adventurous.

This restaurant gentrification shows that racist-classist power dynamics are at play. When we say the only entities that get people excited about sustainable food systems are the ones that attract thirty-year-old bankers, we are just replicating the racism/classism our food systems already holds strong.”