Naming briefs #12
A couple of food brands with bite: GHETTO GASTRO and HECK!
Welcome back to Naming Briefs, an ongoing series in which I scrutinize and analyze brand names I’ve spotted in the wild or in my reading. This report is the twelfth in a series; here’s Naming Briefs #11, which includes links to previous installments. And here’s some background on the series. Drop a note in the comments if you’ve seen a name you’d like me to write about.
Coming soon: my sixteenth annual words-of-the-year nominations (here’s my 2023 list) and the all-new 52 Things I Learned This Year. Don’t miss out! Subscribe!
Ghetto Gastro.
I’ve seen the Ghetto Gastro brand in the wild on two occasions: in a fancy neighborhood food-and-beverage boutique and at the more populist Grocery Outlet, where the brand’s pancake/waffle mix was deeply discounted. Each time I saw the big, bold, all-caps brand name I had two simultaneous thoughts: I need to write about this name and Hoo-boy, this one is going to be tricky.
It’s taken me more than two months to assemble my thoughts about GHETTO GASTRO. On the pro side: It’s a name that reclaims language, challenges assumptions, and is unafraid of risk. It’s fun to say. It’s visually and sonically balanced: the two initial Gs, the two terminal Os. On the con side: The historical baggage of “ghetto,” the medical overtones of “gastro.” Let’s take a look.
I’ll get to GHETTO, the more troublesome of the brand’s two words, in a minute. First, though, here’s the full text of the company’s About page:
Ghetto Gastro is a Bronx-born culinary collective from Jon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker. We’ve notably defined our own lane, merging food, fashion, music, art, and design.
The Bronx serves as our home, muse and a driver of global culture. It’s where Caribbean, Latin, Asian and African cultures seamlessly thrive together, often creating new flavors of their own – including us.
We’re a flavor company. We layer flavor the same way hip hop layers samples and interpolations: as a way to expand, comment, shake up, share, and revel in our collective memory. To us, “Ghetto” means innovation. It’s in our name as a reminder of why we do what we do and who we do it for: to honor the under-represented, under-estimated and too often ignored. It’s our calling card; a way to say “we see you,” and a way to make sure y’all see us.
Emphasis added.
The text is accompanied by a photo of the three Black male founders.
Asserting that “ghetto” means “innovation” is an interesting choice, because for hundreds of years “ghetto” had an entirely different meaning and subtext. Beginning in the 16th century it was “the name of a locality in the Cannaregio district of Venice where Jews were legally required to live by an act of 1516” (per the OED); before that, the area had been the site of a foundry (gheto in the regional dialect). In other words: restriction, and often persecution, not innovation. The Nazis adopted this original sense when they set up Jewish ghettos throughout German-occupied Eastern Europe; the Warsaw Ghetto, site of the tragic 1943 uprising, is the most famous of them.
By the mid-19th century the meaning of “ghetto” had expanded to include the figurative sense of any inward-looking domain or enclave, or any area occupied by a particular social or ethnic group. The American historian Louis Mumford wrote in 1961 about a suburb that was a “green ghetto dedicated to the elite.”
But by that time in the U.S., “ghetto” had taken on a narrower meaning. Beginning in the late 19th century, “ghetto” was understood to be “a socially and economically disadvantaged inner-city area predominantly populated by African American people” (OED again).1
Once you’ve associated a word with an underclass, it’s hard to see it as neutral. Thus, observes Merriam-Webster:
In the U.S., the adjective ghetto is strongly associated with racist attitudes towards the people who live in underprivileged city districts. Although the use of ghetto by and among residents of such districts may be considered neutral, its use by outsiders—particularly to disparage someone or something as being typical of such a city resident or district—is understood to be offensive.
Emphasis added.
What this has come to mean is that, in the U.S. at least, no non-Black person is permitted any use of “ghetto.”2 Remember when Quentin Tarantino was all but tarred and feathered after the 2016 Golden Globes for referring to an imaginary “ghetto” of movie composers? (The BBC published a long explainer for non-Americans, concluding that “Tarantino did not just dismiss film music as a minor sideshow compared with the art of major composers such as Mozart and Beethoven, his use of the word ‘ghetto’ also betrayed a prejudiced attitude to poor African-American people.”) Closer to my own home, in 2019 an upscale, restaurant-rich neighborhood in North Berkeley dropped its informal Gourmet Ghetto nickname when a new-in-town (and swiftly departed) coffee-shop owner, Nick Cho, said he didn’t like it. White liberal guilt: a force for change!3
Black people using “ghetto,” though — that’s a different story. That’s “reclaiming” or “reappropriating” language: The target of a slur adopts the slur as a badge of pride. The reclamation process is what turned “queer” and “dyke” and, to an extent, “bitch,” from negatives to positives.4
And reclamation, I’m guessing, explains why there are currently 102 registered and 32 pending trademarks in the U.S. database for GHETTO, including GHETTO FABULOUS for beer, GHETTO SUPERSTAR for athletic apparel, GHETTO THERAPY for mental health therapy, and GHETTO STILETTO for choreography services. And, of course, GHETTO GASTRO for “catering and food preparation services in the form of a culinary experience featuring the experimental fusion of various world cuisines.
“The history of the ghetto is also the history of the struggle over a word and the attempts to figure out what exactly it means,” says Daniel Schwartz, author of Ghetto: The History of a Word (2019). Can ghetto “mean innovation,” as Ghetto Gastro’s founders claim? That seems like a stretch to me. But once you start reclaiming, you can end up almost anywhere.
As for “gastro,” to some people it will suggest a medical specialty (gastroenterology); to others it will evoke flatulence. I lean toward liking it for its unexpectedness and near rhyme with “ghetto.”
Bottom line: Provocative names, even negative names, are often distinctive. An airline called VIRGIN? A retail chain called BANANA REPUBLIC? Gigantic earth-movers called CATERPILLAR? Expensive fashion called ACNE? The dissonance works to their benefit. GHETTO GASTRO is a similarly risky choice. It’s not the most appetizing choice on the name menu, but it may be the most effective one.
Heck!
I’ve never seen HECK! products in the wild, because they’re sold and delivered only in the U.K. In fact, I can’t quite remember how I discovered the brand. But it was a delightful discovery.
Heck! makes meat and meat-free sausages in a variety of shapes and flavors, including one I’d never heard of: chipolata, a small spicy sausage used chiefly as a garnish or hors d’oeuvre, according to Merriam-Webster. (The connection to cipolla, Italian for “onion,” is not accidental.)
The company website doesn’t give a reason for the Heck! name, but there’s a good chance it comes from a place name in North Yorkshire, near where the company is headquartered. There’s a Great Heck and a Little Heck; together their population totals about 200. According to the Yorkshire Historical Dictionary, a “heck” (also spelled heke or hekke) is a regional word for “hatch.”
“Heck” is also a euphemism for “hell” — it first appeared in print that way in mid-1800s England, and later caught on in other English-speaking regions.
Whatever its source, Heck! is an inspired choice, and the company — owned by the Keeble family — goes to town with it. Its motto is “Flavour you can swear by”; its recipe section is headlined “Give ’em HECK!” Its mission statement is distilled into H.E.C.K.: Health, Environment, Community, and Kindness.
That mission is not just a bunch of corporate platitudes. In October Heck! launched a free bus service for people living in isolated parts of rural Yorkshire. “Residents can book the pink bus service and either drive it themselves, or request a driver,” the BBC reported. Heck! will pay for fuel from its community fund.
Short, snappy, fun, and authentic. Do I love this name? Heck, yeah!
Ugh, “inner-city.” It sounds like it refers to a geographical location, but most of the time it doesn’t. It’s just a mealy-mouthed euphemism.
Back in September, participants in my Substack chat about Ghetto Gastro were vehement in their disapproval of the name: “utterly despicable,” “about as offensive as you can get,” and — thanks,
! — “could refer to a cut-rate colonoscopy.”
“The only way the list could be more British would be if it included ‘with the vicar.’” Heck yeah!
It might be a regional and/or US/UK thing, but "gastro" can have positive overtones for food, as in the term "gastropub", which I believe is pretty common in the UK. And which one occasionally sees in the US for bars that wish to cloak their food offerings in higher prices, I mean, in a veil of gourmandism.