Paving over taquerias to put up condos: constructing urban imaginaries of migrant foodscapes via digital food narratives

Hammelman, Colleen; Carr Salas, Consuelo; Tornabene, Sara

doi:10.1080/15528014.2023.2263703

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…Our work extends theoretical and empirical work on the sociology of taste (Bourdieu 1987;Peterson 1997;Johnston and Baumann 2007;Williamson et al 2009), especially as it relates to racialized criticism and the devaluation of marginalized producers (Grazian 2005;Childress and Nault 2019;Chong 2011;Janer 2005;Liu 2009;Ray 2007Ray , 2017Gualtieri 2022;Hammelman, Carr Salas, and Tornabene 2023). We also draw from the broader literatures on othering, authenticity, and stereotyping (Said 1978;12 https://www.yelp-press.com/company/fast-facts/default.aspx Martynuska 2016) and work examining these attitudes in Yelp reviews (Hirose and Pih 2011;Kovács, Carroll, and Lehman 2014;Gottlieb 2015;Boch, Jiménez, and Roesler 2021) and food contexts more broadly (Freedman and Jurafsky 2011;Lee et al 2012;Oleschuk 2017).…”

Section: Further Related Workmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…Prior work on immigrant food attitudes has used coarsergrained signals such as numerical restaurant ratings (Ray 2007) or studied review language within smaller scale datasets (Johnston and Baumann 2007;Gottlieb 2015;Gualtieri 2022;Hammelman, Carr Salas, and Tornabene 2023). Meanwhile, larger-scale studies have ignored restaurant and neighborhood-related factors (e.g., price point, neighborhood racial diversity) that may be confounded with review sentiment (Boch, Jiménez, and Roesler 2021;Yu and Margolin 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Othering and Low Status Framing of Immigrant Cuisines in US Restaurant Reviews and Large Language Models

Luo,

Gligorić,

Jurafsky

2024

ICWSM

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Identifying implicit attitudes toward food can help mitigate social prejudice due to food’s pervasive role as a marker of ethnic identity. Stereotypes about food are representational harms that may contribute to racialized discourse and negatively impact economic outcomes for restaurants. Understanding the presence of representational harms in online corpora in particular is important, given the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) for text generation and their tendency to reproduce attitudes in their training data. Through careful linguistic analyses, we evaluate social theories about attitudes toward immigrant cuisine in a large-scale study of framing differences in 2.1M English language Yelp reviews. Controlling for factors such as restaurant price and neighborhood racial diversity, we find that immigrant cuisines are more likely to be othered using socially constructed frames of authenticity (e.g., authentic, traditional), and that non-European cuisines (e.g., Indian, Mexican) in particular are described as more exotic compared to European ones (e.g., French). We also find that non-European cuisines are more likely to be described as cheap and dirty, even after controlling for price, and even among the most expensive restaurants. Finally, we show that reviews generated by LLMs reproduce similar framing tendencies, pointing to the downstream retention of these representational harms. Our results corroborate social theories of gastronomic stereotyping, revealing racialized evaluative processes and linguistic strategies through which they manifest.

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