Donghyoun We

This 12-month ethnographic project examines ghost kitchens in Los Angeles as emergent restaurant formations in which race, technology, food, and labor become refracted in novel ways. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants, ghost kitchens have no front-of-house. Instead, they are operated out of large warehouse-like structures that house multiple delivery-only restaurant “concepts” or “brands” which consumers engage with entirely through food-delivery apps. Within this context I conduct an ethnographic exploration focusing on ghost kitchens branded as being “Asian” to ask, broadly: what do ghost kitchens reveal about how digitality is reshaping labor (particularly racialized labor) and processes of cultural production, and what does this reveal about the connections between food, race, capital, and digital technologies? In doing so, I put a longstanding object of anthropological interest and inquiry – the relationship between food and culture – in productive conversation with one of the discipline’s latest and most pressing concerns – digitality’s place in the making of social worlds. My project will contribute to scholarly understandings of how digital and physical infrastructures co-constitutively shape, mediate, and reformulate conditions of life and regimes of labor.