Demand for diversity: The global expansion of Chinatown's food system

New York City presents an enormous and ever-changing market for a large variety of fruits and vegetables. Some products are produced regionally, most come from distant corners of the world. Recent studies on agricultural commodity chains in the United States suggest that homogenization and corporate appropriation are associated with spatial expansion of food distribution. Yet within New York City methods of food procurement are continually remade. Chinese immigrants in Manhattan's Chinatown have developed a diverse and dynamic system to satisfy the demands of East Asian ethnic groups. Although Chinatown's food system has been rapidly undergoing geographic expansion, it displays characteristics apart from other global food systems. The seemingly unique nature of this system of trade leads to the main research questions, how is the distribution and production of Asian fruits and vegetables organized? Is it different than corporately controlled, globalized agriculture? What are its social and environmental impacts? Tying together previous studies on the globalization of agriculture, alternative food systems, and studies on agrobiodiversity, this project describes and analyzes the cultivation and marketing of Asian fruits and vegetables on a newly emergent global scale. The project is multi-sited and includes New York City as the market destination, southern Florida as a well-established point of production and distribution, and Honduras as a newly emergent site of production. This project combines standard ecological surveys and semi-structured interviews to examine how the relationships between vendors, distributors, and producers ultimately influence the use of plant resources in a food system. By focusing on a system broadly distinguished by cultural preferences, this research describes how immigrants not only create new market demands, but concurrently create new systems of resource use to satisfy their demands. Results show trade networks based in social relations, diverse cropping systems, and family owned and operated firms constitute the food system. This understanding is significant in a world of highly mobile people and commodities. This project builds on the tradition of research that looks at the influence of political and economic structures on natural resource use, while taking a new approach that integrates this tradition with research on global agricultural systems.