The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

CHAPTER 8 A Salad Bowl City: The Food Geography of Charlotte, North Carolina

CHAPTER 8 ▶ A Salad Bowl City The Food Geography of Charlotte, North Carolina tom hanchett Exploring foodways can open up fresh perspectives on wider society. In my neighborhood along Central Avenue in Charlotte, North Carolina, ethnic restaurants and grocery stores started popping up in the 1990s. Today at the corner of Central and Rosehaven, you can park your car amid a jumble of little shopping plazas and walk to a Vietnamese grocery and two Vietnamese restaurants, a Mexican grocery and a taqueria, a Salvadoran deli and two Salvadoran eateries, a Somali restaurant and grocery, an Ethiopian bar-restaurant-nightclub, and a Lebanese grocery-restaurant. It’s a delightful place to sample unfamiliar cuisines. It turns out also to be an exciting window on a whole new urban geography. In fast-growing southern metropolitan areas such as Charlotte, and less visibly in older cities as well, people are creating what might be called “salad bowl suburbs”—a new, mixed-up, tossed salad of cultures. Not Melting Pot, not Chinatown, but a Salad Bowl For generations,a couple of mental models dominated discussion of ethnicity in U.S.cities.One was the melting pot.The other was the image of ethnic enclave—Chinatown, Little Italy, and the like—which scholars elaborated into the notion of urban ecology,a narrative of inevitable“invasion and succession .” Let’s look first at those ideas before moving on to what is actually happening today. The melting pot is one of the most cherished metaphors of American culture.It harks back to the steel mills of the late nineteenth and early twen- A Salad Bowl City 167 tieth centuries where iron ore, coke, and other raw inputs came together at intense temperatures in giant cauldrons called crucibles. Poured out and cooled, the resulting steel was a new material, stronger than any of its components .What a wonderful image for this nation whose motto is“one from many,” e pluribus unum. Hector Crèvecoeur, a French writer visiting America , called attention to the melting effect as early as 1782: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.” The melting pot seems to have become the dominant metaphor around 1900 as photographs of white-hot crucibles in the rolling mills of Pittsburgh appeared in the era’s new illustrated magazines and photogravure sections of newspapers. Implicit in the melting pot image was the notion that immigrants must lose the cultures they brought with them and create a new uniformly American culture.“Understand that America is God’s Crucible,the great MeltingPot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand . . . in your fifty groups, your fifty languages, and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries.But you won’t be long like that,brothers. . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians— into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”So wrote Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot in 1909. That date coincided with America’s largest immigrant wave.Beginning in the 1850s and gathering momentum into the 1910s,the United States experienced a growing tide of new arrivals that defined the nation we know today. It also generated intense fear.Would existing American culture be drowned out? The new profession of social work, the increased push for universal public education, and the rise of scholarly fields such as urban sociology were just a few of the responses as people sought to understand what was going on and help Americanize the newcomers.Ultimately,in 1917 and 1924, strict laws halted most immigration except from areas deemed culturally safe such as England. The arrivals who streamed into American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to settle in distinct neighborhoods. Some of that resulted from natural tendencies for people of like language and foodways to cluster and help each other out. But the dominant society also played a huge role. Real estate professionals united to refuse to sell or rent to particular ethnic groups. Restrictive covenants, a legal tool inserted into 168 Tom Hanchett deeds to limit who could buy or occupy the land, became commonplace by the 1890s.The practice of zoning,which spread during the 1920s,reinforced those boundaries. The upshot was a pattern of ethnic enclaves. Chinatown, Little Italy, Greektown, the Barrio, and also African American districts all became accepted and expected in...