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This chapter presents the story of PigFest in Coppell, Texas, which, unlike the Gilroy Garlic Festival, represents a failed attempt to create a sense of community and place identity through a place-specific food festival. It shows that the most significant factors informing a place-based food festival’s success or failure are the displayed and implied semiotics of food symbolization and the degree to which organizers allow for communal participation.

This chapter examines food festivals at the Wat Thai of Los Angeles, the first and largest Thai Buddhist temple in the nation, which was established in 1979, as a window on the relationship between food, race, and place in the suburbs during the 1980s. It charts Thai American suburbanization in the East San Fernando Valley near Wat Thai and traces the history of the temple, including how it evolved into a community space that became popular for its weekend food festivals. The festivals, which attracted thousands of visitors, fostered a public-oriented Thai American suburban culture that was a claim for a "right to the global city." The festivals, however, sparked complaints from a group of nearby residents, who used zoning laws to try to shut them down. The chapter contends that the residents who opposed the festivals articulated a liberal multiculturalism to maintain the white spatial imaginary of the neighborhood.

This chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to explore the creation and perpetuation of Gilroy’s identity as a foodscape, a food-themed place. It then explains the concept of foodscape; traces the history of the development of Gilroy, California; and discusses the campaign to promote Gilroy as the Garlic Capital of the World.

This chapter analyzes major events at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which include the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, garlic braiding classes, and the garlic topping contest. It argues that as place-based food festival royalty, the Garlic Queen personifies the locality’s food–place association. She and her court symbolize Gilroy and its garlic, further strengthening garlic’s role as the vehicle by which citizens of Gilroy affirm community values. The garlic braiding classes enact the classic festival inversion: what is in reality work is situated as play, and those who normally enjoy the fruits of others’ labors do the labor themselves. The garlic topping contest is a microcosm of the labor, power, and race relations of garlic production in Santa Clara County, and of worker–consumer relations in general.

This chapter ties together the loose threads of the preceding discussions. It argues that there are multiple dimensions to iconizing food as a strategy of place branding and community building, and that the symbolic meaning associated with or attributed to food informs its use as iconic of collective identity. The story of how Gilroy became a festive foodscape illustrates how branded place identities are shaped by history, zeitgeist, imagination, perception, culinary curiosity, and a quest for differentiation.