Bedfellows | Hungry in San Francisco

One hundred feet below the Starbucks and suits of San Francisco’s financial district, Grubhub.com’s posters beckon from the BART station walls. The online food delivery service offers every kind of cuisine, from hamburgers to filet mignon. But its ads, placed in the city’s train stations and on its buses, broadcast the availability of only three foods: burritos, pizza, and sushi—all handheld, portable, and associated with a distinct ethnic group.

What do we seek when we pursue dining experiences that serve ethnicity alongside entrées? Feminist scholar bell hooks writes that, “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”).  When ethnic difference becomes a commodity, hooks argues, it can be purchased, consumed, and deactivated. Nuanced legacies of multiethnic interaction get overlooked in favor of decontextualized food items whose consumption diners mistake for an authentic cultural exchange.

In their merging of public transportation, ethnicity, and food, Grubhub’s ads offer an abbreviated version of an everyday San Francisco experience. The city’s thirty-plus neighborhoods are often delineated along ethnic, as well as cultural and geographic, lines. Public transportation facilitates travel among these enclaves, many of which are associated with a type of ethnic food.

For example: You take the 38 Geary to the Richmond for pho, the 22 Fillmore to the Mission for mole burritos. The 1 California takes you through Chinatown, where you can get cheap dim sum. Grubhub provides one slice of this experience—food—offering weary train and bus riders the opportunity to stay home and order with just a computerized click. But staying home misses the point: there’s a conversation going on between San Francisco’s neighborhoods and its food, and in that dialogue’s rhythms and silences are revelations about the meals on our plates and the city around us.

I’m in a taqueria on 24^th Street in the Mission. A futbol match between Argentina and Honduras plays on the television overhead. The only time I know what’s going on in the game is when the Spanish-speaking announcer pulls out the word “Goooaaal” like taffy. It’s 2011, but the restaurant’s interior is set in the early nineteenth century. Tiled eaves and arched doorways adorn the walls, while a mural depicts a pastoral scene set in a presumably Mexican rancho: women knead tortillas in a courtyard, bison stand yoked to a cart, and hilly fields of agriculture extend to the horizon. The white couple sitting in front of the mural offers to pretend to admire it while I take a picture.

The Mission district, home to the city’s Irish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century, has been a predominantly Latino neighborhood since World War II. Like many neighborhoods labeled “ethnic,” the district also historically attracted artists seeking low rents and non-mainstream culture. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly white tech workers, fueled by the high salaries of the dot-com boom, began moving into the Mission district. The current neighborhood reflects these waves of migration.

It’s simpler inside the taqueria. Awkward cultural exchanges may be taking place on the sidewalks and in the nearby apartment buildings, but here, “Latino culture” is neatly wrapped and only $6, chips included. Or it’s in the mural, which locates ethnicity safely in the past, stuck in time and place.

Within the neighborhood’s dynamic and multi-ethnic landscape, such simplistic presentations offer a misleading though reassuring counterpoint. As white people live amongst and displace long-standing Latino residents, burritos and tacos offer white diners a non-confrontational cultural experience in which concern over what type of salsa to choose displaces concern over gentrification.

In my next installment, I interview Sita Bhaumik, a San Francisco–based artist whose curry powder–centric work engages with ideas of food, ethnicity, and difference.