Introduction: The Food Business and the American Dream: Gateway or Obstacle?

The papers in this section invite us to think about our relationship to food, to those who make food—their working conditions, their aspirations—and the multiple meanings and knowledge enveloped in food making. The processes through which migrants create and share their recipes, and the way in which immigrant restaurant owners or mobile food vendors conceive of and experience the process of producing food, are sites where questions about authenticity, integration, empowerment, and identity, as well as labor rights and sustainability, are productively engaged.