Amanda Green
SAFN President
SAFN is excited to announce its 2025 Future of Food Fellows: D.H. We and Elif Birbiri. Started in 2023, the aim of this fellowship is to amplify and support the research, community-engaged scholarship, and activism of self-identified junior scholars of color and catalyze more public engagement with food anthropology, while also building a more inclusive anthropology of food and nutrition. Read more about our past fellows Dr. Vanessa Castenada and Carolyn Mason here. Our next application cycle will take place in 2027.
D.H. We is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Their current scholarly work coheres around Los Angeles-based ghost kitchens, a novel restaurant formation that proliferated in the wake of COVID-19’s destabilization of the service industry.
The operative word in “ghost kitchen” – ghost – indexes the phantasmic and seemingly immaterial nature of this kind of dining experience. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants, ghost kitchens have no front-of-house. Instead, ghost kitchen businesses are predominantly operated out of large, corporate-owned warehouse-like structures that house upwards of 30-40 different delivery-only restaurant “concepts” or “brands,” as they’re known in industry jargon. Orders are mediated almost entirely through third-party delivery platforms (e.g., Uber Eats) and gig-workers, highlighting the growing role of Big Tech in urban food ecologies and economies.
In this context, D.H. explores how digital technologies are reshaping regimes of labor and relationships to (and through) food. As David Beriss and David Sutton (2007) have argued, restaurants are “ideal postmodern institutions” that are constituted at the nexus of social and economic life. Ghost kitchens, however, challenge traditional notions of what a restaurant is, given that they are emergent restaurant formations which can only manifest at the nexus of physical and digital infrastructures. As such, D.H.’s research asks, broadly: what do ghost kitchens reveal about how digitality is reshaping labor and processes of cultural production, and what does this reveal about the connections between food, race, capital, and digital technologies? As an anthropologist, they are particularly interested in how ethnographic accounts of differently-positioned groups of laborers in ghost kitchen ecologies might enrich our understanding of infrastructural (in)visibilities, the competing promises and limits of digital technologies, and social and economic relations constituted by and through food. In addition to the support of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, their scholarly work has also been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Ethnological Society, and UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures.
Prior to starting graduate school, D.H. worked in restaurants throughout their youth in both back-of-house and front-of house positions. Their scholarly work is informed by their experiences of restaurants as spaces of labor, as well as spaces of social connection and learning. They have also cooked in local autonomous pop-up kitchens in Los Angeles to support labor movements and community members more broadly in the form of mutual aid. Such work reflects an understanding of food as being, at its best, a powerful social and material object that simultaneously nourishes individual bodies, social relations, and visions of a more just future.