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The sociology of food consumption has emerged as a robust field with rich empirical material and engaged theorization about taste, omnivorousness, distinction, and practice theory. Nevertheless, there are continuing empirical and conceptual lacunae. Although transnational and rural-to-urban migrants play a crucial role in food businesses in many global cities, they are mostly unaccounted for in the sociology of taste. Taking the American case, in particular based on data from New York City, this article provides reasons for that gap and shows what might be gained if migrants were accounted for in the urban sociology of taste. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anti-globalization and anti-science rhetoric become central to right-wing agendas, the study of food allows social scientists and humanities-oriented scholars to rethink their posture towards both. After "question everything" becomes a fact-free, alt-right, call to arms, we are forced to learn new lessons in how radical doubt could be a socially dubious thing. We can no longer return to the metaphysical question of truth with certainty. Nevertheless, pure criticism feels inadequate at this precarious moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Productive new openings can be found in food studies through provincializing European and American conceptualizations of the aesthetics of good taste and the ethics of foodwork. The liberal arts can be reinvigorated for the twenty-first century by drawing on feminism and everyday Hinduism of care-work and devotion, in part by using the immigrant body not merely as an object of analysis but as a tool kit to open up the epistemological discussion on how we know what to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented in which the author argues that taste in food in the U.S. is jointly produced by immigrants to the U.S. and native-born Americans, and that the work necessary to produce socially significant food has largely been done by immigrants in U.S. cities in U.S. history. The article also discusses the process of designing and administering urban restaurants, particularly restaurants owned by immigrants in New York City.

The theoretical discussion of taste is overwhelmingly shaped by concerns about distinction and omnivorousness from the perspective of the white, anglophone consumer. The scholarship on what customers get out of eating ethnic food is substantial, yet it dismisses any volition or aspiration on the part of the immigrant producer of food outside of economic necessity. This paper inserts the habits, memories, work and dreams of immigrant entrepreneurs into the discussion of taste. It focuses on the "ethnic" restaurateur as the hinge between taste and toil - two streams of theoretical accounts that could be put in productive conversation with each other. It is based on interviews with thirty immigrant restaurateurs, and buttressed by descriptive quantitative data derived from US historical censuses, mainstream and diasporic newspaper coverage of restaurants, guidebooks (current and historical), telephone directories, restaurant reviews in print and online, menus, recipes and practices of cooking. 'The work pays attention to the peculiar intimacy between the anglo and the ethnic that has always shaped public cultures of eating in the United States. In the process. the author points to the limits of disciplinarity in the current research on the fond cultures of US cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]