What Is 'Gastrification'? How Globalization Is Making Food Look Alike

What 'gastrification' means

The word "gastrificación" was put into circulation by journalist Anxo F. Couceiro in an article published on the Spanish outlet elDiario.es on September 25, 2023. He used it to describe restaurants that, without being part of any franchise, increasingly behave like one: the same patatas bravas, the same mushroom croquettes marketed as "homemade," the same burrata, tuna tataki and avocado bagels, served inside near-identical minimalist interiors.

According to the article, many dishes that look like a chef's signature creation are in fact prepared in large external supplier kitchens and simply plated to order, which is part of why menus in unrelated restaurants can read almost like photocopies of one another.

The same café, wherever you are

Since 2016, media-studies scholar Fabio Parasecoli and sociologist Mateusz Halawa have documented what they call "Global Brooklyn": a recurring set of materials, objects and rituals — reclaimed wood, exposed brick, specialty coffee, kombucha, blackboards and deliberately hard-to-read menus — that shows up in coffee shops and food halls in cities as different as Mumbai, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen. Their findings were first published in the journal Food, Culture & Society in 2019 and later expanded into the book "Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities," published by Bloomsbury Academic.

A study described in The Conversation and carried out by Conrad Kickert, an architecture researcher at the University at Buffalo, Jeffrey Parker, an urban sociologist at the University of New Orleans, and Kelly Gregg, an urban planning researcher at the University at Buffalo, tested this uniformity directly. The researchers surveyed more than 100 North American professionals about their favorite independent coffee shops and found that over half of the shops described used chalkboards, reclaimed wood, local art or exposed brick, and about two-thirds had tattooed or pierced baristas. In a follow-up experiment, 158 participants were shown six photos of coffee shops from Cincinnati, St. Louis and Toronto and asked to match each photo to its city; none of the participants matched all of them correctly. In a separate round using photos from Chicago and San Francisco, only 6% of participants correctly matched both to their cities.

Beyond the plate: diets are converging too

Homogenization is not limited to restaurant decor. A 2014 study led by Colin Khoury of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported by Time, analyzed 50 years of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data and found that national diets had grown more similar to one another by a global average of about 36%.

The study found that wheat, maize and soybeans increasingly dominate what the world eats, displacing regional staples such as cassava and sorghum. Time's reporting noted that the trend has coincided with rising obesity rates, which it said had nearly doubled worldwide since 1980, and with growing reliance on a narrow set of crops that researchers say leaves food supplies more exposed to disease, pests or climate shocks.

What's driving the sameness

• Tourism: the elDiario.es article quotes Lakshmi Aguirre, a Basque Culinary Center professor, arguing that tourism is one of the forces most capable of blurring the character of a place.
• Social media and algorithms: Global Brooklyn researchers and the Buffalo/New Orleans study both point to platforms such as Instagram, which reward visuals that already perform well, pushing owners toward trends that have already proven popular elsewhere.
• Risk-averse financing: according to The Conversation article, banks and lenders tend to favor cheaper, broadly appealing interior-design choices when financing new cafés, which narrows the range of looks that get built.
• Supply chains and franchising: the elDiario.es piece reports that pre-made dishes from external kitchens, standardized renovation materials and even beer-company-subsidized decor push independent restaurants toward a common template.

Does local food survive?

None of the sources describe homogenization as total. The Global Brooklyn researchers found that the same aesthetic is adapted to "particular histories or conflicts" in each city, producing local variation rather than identical copies. The elDiario.es article similarly cites Aguirre's view that restaurants rooted in their own territory persist alongside chains, even as investment groups replicate standardized formats.