Restaurant Citizens to the Barricades! Brenda Gayle Plummer (bio) I Professor Ruiz's loving and celebratory account of the production and consumption of food recognizes it as our most fundamental social activity. Food is a core component of both cultural affirmation and cultural resistance, and of adaptation and pragmatism. John Brown Childs's description of African American cookery can in part be applied to the culinary traditions of any of America's peoples: "a system of knowledge" whose "enclosed nature . . . had to do with the very means of its transmission." It was an "unwritten book . . . partly an oral tradition" reliant on memory that "resembled an underground form of written communication, a samizdat-type of sharing of information from hand to hand." The cuisine "required a social intimacy that could not be expressed on the printed page" of a conventional cookbook.1 The market's intrusion in recent decades into the homegrown sociality of U.S. ethnic cultures has altered some of these characteristics, often subtly, sometimes dramatically. Some forty years ago, the conventional restaurant menu began expanding beyond steakhouse, Chinese, or Continental options in accompaniment to the changing national demographic. Other transformations over the years, including evolving gender roles, led to greater numbers of people dining outside the home and more translation of comfortable old standards into money-making prospects.2 The phrase "Citizen Restaurant" has particular resonance in this regard and is open to a fascinating array of other inferences for observers of U.S. society past and present. Among its many implications is its resort to commerce, where food and citizenship are equally up for grabs. Alternatively, we could reverse the word order to come up with "Restaurant Citizen," an apt description of the hard and low-paid work characteristic of that industry, one that employs disproportionate numbers of undocumented workers from other republics in the Americas. To be a Restaurant Citizen also implies both membership and subjection to what Lizabeth Cohen has called the Consumer's Republic, one [End Page 23] in which community and communion are hardly distinguishable from the exigencies of business.3 If the restaurant as an institution marks some kind of polity, food sold and consumed outside its confines displaces its authority. In various parts of the country, street vendors, locked in perpetual conflict with municipal governments over issues of control, also challenge the restaurant's proprieties. They dispute the larger society's attempts to define them as nuisances rather than entrepreneurs, and to exclude them from the freewheeling capitalism recommended by purveyors of the American Dream. Affluent Americans whose immigrant forebears wracked up their first successes with a pushcart now denounce others trying to follow suit. Restaurants index the various ways that we preserve and extend the practices and influences of our specific communities. We might ask what happens when some aspects of these are commodified along with the actual foodstuffs. Restaurants, that is, are sites of food tourism as well as production. Because tourism—unlike travel, per se—must please, food is often eaten outside its natal social and cultural contexts. The restaurant might allude in decor and ambiance to ethnic origins, but these are for sale too. Food as tourism, then, has become a site of power because of its location at the nexus of consumerism, popular culture, and relations among peoples and nations. Since food tourism relies substantially on the novel and the exotic—otherwise why not eat at home?—chefs must locate unusual ingredients and come up with innovative combinations. This leads them to import from various parts of the world victuals that cost a lot in terms of the energy required to transport and refrigerate them. The flowers that grace the charming tables of our favorite restaurants also often travel. Budding and blooming in vast Central American fields, sprayed with pesticide, and bundled by hard-pressed female workers, they arrive in the United States to enhance our experience of dining, showing no trace of their stressful past or the birth defects and illnesses that their care has inflicted on their handlers.4 Some commentators concerned with health and sustainable agriculture measure "food miles," the distance to market that particular comestibles must travel. Interestingly, much of the literature...