A Time When Bubbles Burst: Addressing Representation, Diversity, and Inequality in Writings about Restaurants in the United States, Post-2020

An expanding body of work demonstrates that American food writing is extending its reach beyond pleasure and abundance to address systemic problems. It has gradually moved away from the practice of assigning status and value to certain foodways, a task predominantly performed by food authorities who did not reflect diverse backgrounds. Instead, recent food journalism engages in discussions regarding class, race, colonialism, ableism, weight stigma, labor rights, and immigration policies, among other pertinent social and political issues. Self-scrutiny is one of its distinguishing features. Much of this change was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which created the circumstances in which food writing became more self-reflexive and more likely to take a political stance. The central aim of this article is to center writings on restaurants to explore key insights from chefs and authors who explicitly reorient their work toward social justice. This shift can be identified in the Best American Food Writing series (2020–2021) and is supported by other contemporary works that discuss food and sociopolitical issues with an emphasis on the restaurant critic’s positionality. The article closes with a consideration of the long-term impact of the main reckoning that occurred in 2020.