Early in 2018, more than 25,000 people signed a Change.org petition to “Stop Starbucks in Yosemite,” apparently agreeing with the sentiment of its creator that “multinational corporations have no place in our national parks” (Concerned Citizen 2018). Park lovers were outraged that Yosemite Valley Lodge, operated by multinational giant Aramark, was planning to open a Starbucks kiosk in its Base-camp Eatery food court. Although some fretted about a possible increase in litter or said they thought it would be better to support small businesses, a great number of the posters articulated their reasons for signing the petition along the line of one signer, Terry Barber: “Bringing corporate giants into a National Park may be the beginning of the end for an iconic American place.” What many of the petition signers seemed not to realize is that US national parks are already foodscapes dominated by large corporations.
This chapter examines the foodscape of today’s national parks and investigates how the parks and their approved concessioners narrativize these foodscapes and the identity of those who patronize them. How are the competing mandates of US national parks—preservation of natural spaces and enjoyment of these spaces by the citizenry—manifest or reconciled within the possibilities for eating in the parks? What does the nation’s reliance on industrial food concessions in the parks reveal about the tensions inherent in the mission of the park service? To answer these questions, I provide an overview of the US national park foodscape and a more detailed analysis of the way eating is narrativized by the dominant concessioner in Yellowstone National Park as a case study.
From the Latin concession-, from the verb concedere, “concession” means a yield or grant, and concessions have come in the US to be associated with food or snack stands, sold in a venue that does not operate the stands; the venue has made a concession to a vendor, a concession to the public. It’s a seemingly “meh” arrangement, rooted in compromise from the start. The venue says, “Okay, we’ll sell you something to eat, because you’re a human and you’re going to get hungry, but food is not the main point of why you are here.” And the public says, “Okay, I’ll accept the limited choices and perhaps lower quality, because at least there’s something to eat here, and it’s awfully far or inconvenient to eat elsewhere.”
Currently, the National Park Service (NPS) manages 425 individual units in the
50 states, Washington DC, and US territories; these include 63 official national parks, as well as a host of other types of designations, including national monuments, national historic sites, national historical parks, national recreation areas, national battlefields, national seashores, and the list goes on (National Park Service 2022b). Although I occasionally mention these alternative kinds of units in this book, the foodscapes of the 63 official parks are my primary concern, not only because this helps me to manage scope but also because the official parks have an outsized and special role in the American public imaginary.
Visitors to most parks have limited eating options. Some choose to eat in restaurants outside the parks in gateway towns, which are often well set up to accommodate hungry tourists. Others pack a cooler and take advantage of picnicking opportunities, happy when they can find an open picnic table, or they tote a blanket to spread under a shady tree. Some camp and enjoy cooking their own food over the campfire. But for most visitors to the parks—those both unprepared with their own food and those hoping for a tasty or unique or possibly just convenient nosh inside park borders—the dining options are those provided by concessioners.
What is a park food concession? These days, they are most commonly grills, snack bars, or cafeteria-style eateries, serving a basic menu meant to appeal broadly. Their food is generally not fancy, and the emphasis is on scale, with operations meant to serve a large number of park visitors in as efficient a fashion as possible. Stalwart dishes like burgers, pizza, chicken tenders, and salads appear on park menu boards across the land from Denali National Park in Alaska to Ever-glades National Park in Florida. To win concessions contracts, the businesses that operate the venues must ensure that their prices are relatively affordable, and that the food meets specified nutritional requirements, along with the predictable health and safety practices. A small number of concessioners operate more aspirational restaurants—sit-down venues with table service, long waits in high season, a more curated menu, and (often) priceless views of some of the country’s most remark-able landscapes, like the fiery caldera of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and the stunning peaks of Grand Teton National Park.
According to NPS guidelines, concessioners are not only responsible for pro-viding high-quality facilities and services, but they are also required to participate in the interpretation of the park to visitors. This interpretive mission can be accomplished in any number of ways, according to the NPS: “through guided activities; the design, architecture, landscape, and décor of facilities; educational programs; interpretive menu design and menu offerings; and involvement in the park’s overall interpretive program” (National Park Service 2006, 145). The park service takes an active role in evaluating the concessions to ensure that their rates are fair, that they are complying with best environmental management practices, and, for food service operations, that their compliance with health and sanitation standards is up to snuff.
Ownership and operation of park concessions have shifted over the years, from a somewhat chaotic scene with independently owned, hypercompetitive business in the early years of the parks (1872–1915), to a consolidated “one park, one concessioner” model in the decades after the 1916 establishment of the NPS. National park concessions today are quasi-monopolies that tend to be run by conglomerates. Large companies win government contracts for exclusive rights to provide food, lodging, gift shops, and other activities and services in the park. A few behemoths hold contracts in multiple parks, raking in a very large share of overall concessions income.
Currently, four large companies—Aramark, Delaware North, Ortega, and Xanterra—operate the lion’s share of park food concessions in 36 parks that currently have them (National Park Service 2022a). The quasi-monopolistic nature of these contracts means that in many parks, one single company operates every food service vendor within the park. For instance, at Mesa Verde, Aramark is the only game in town, operating the cafeteria-style Spruce Tree Terrace Café, the food court-style Far View Terrace Café, the fancier fine-dining Metate Room, the sports-pub Far View Lounge, the campground-based breakfast-oriented Knife Edge Café, and even the Morefield Campground Store, for one’s snacking needs. In other parks, there might be a few concessioners present, like at Yellowstone, where Xanterra runs about 20 restaurants and where Delaware North has a smaller contract to operate a dozen general stores that also sell food. The domination of the park landscape by a handful of companies means a uniform and predictable, not particularly distinctive, experience for travelers. These large companies covet concession contracts because of their profitability, as they are uniquely protected from competition under favorable terms of contract and were historically granted preferential rights to contract renewal (Hartzog 1988).
The remainder of the food concessions in the parks are run by subsidiaries of larger companies whose primary business is not in national parks, smaller companies not focused on food, or, rarely, an individual proprietor. In the subsidiary category, at Mount Rainier, visitors can eat in a handful of cafes or lodge dining rooms, all operated by Rainier Guest Services, a subsidiary of Guest Services Inc, which also operates at the National Mall and Stehekin in North Cascades. Or at Gateway Arch, the food concessions are run by Arch Café, LLC, an Evelyn Hill Company, which also operates concessions at Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. In the category of smaller companies not focused on food, a handful of food concession contracts are with businesses that primarily operate transit concessions but also vend food to customers while they are traveling within or to a park; for in-stance, Island Packers Corporation (Channel Islands) and Yankee Freedom III (Dry Tortugas) are one-park operations primarily focused on boating with snack bars on board. Very, very few park concessions are of the “mom and pop” variety, given both economies of scale and the complex bidding and contracting process, but a handful do exist, like the privately managed Great Basin Café in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park.
A few parks have multiple food service concessioners. For instance, the NPS has established food service contracts in Everglades National Park with four different small outfits (Coopertown Everglades Airboat Tour and Restaurant, Everglades Safari Park, Gator Park; and Everglades Guest Services LLC); likewise, there are three companies (Olympic Peninsula Hospitality LLC alongside biggies Delaware North and Aramark) providing food service operations at Olympic National Park. But there are no food concessions at all in nearly half of the nation’s 63 official national parks: 27 of the parks, including some heavily visited sites like Arches and Joshua Tree, and some truly remote ones like Lake Clark and American Samoa, have no food services onsite whatsoever.1
Even when there’s no official concession contracted with the NPS, visitors may sometimes still be able to access food. For instance, at Indiana Dunes National Park, the Dunes Pavilion is situated on state park land, not national park land, but this would be imperceptible to the national park visitor who strolls up from the sand for some soft serve. Likewise, most visitors to the eatery at the posh Inn at Death Valley will not realize that they are on an inholding, a privately owned piece of land surrounded by Death Valley National Park, and thus what’s on offer there is not subject to the same requirements as official park concessions. (Being run by Xanterra means that the offerings will be quite familiar anyhow.) Nor might eaters at the Superior Bathhouse Brewery or Eden, the Hotel Hale’s restaurant, realize that they are in Hot Springs National Park but not eating at a park-authorized
concession—the only giveaways are the variety, price, and foodie-ness that are typically not found in an official concession.
Park concessions are profitable for corporate managers, with contracts guaranteeing the conditions for wider margins than the restaurant business in general. The market is literally hungry; according to an NPS report on visitor spending effects, in 2021, park visitors spent $4.2 billion at restaurants and bars and $1.5 billion on food at grocery and convenience stores (National Park Service 2021, 12). Food concessions at Yellowstone National Park alone, for instance, generated over $30 million in revenue in 2016 (Government Food Service 2017). The economies of scale that allow large companies to employ staff solely for the purposes of contract procurement and to install cookie-cutter operations in multiple parks make business sense, and result in a standard and predictable eating experience at most parks.
Beyond the highly visible NPS-authorized park concessions, eateries in gateway towns, and whatever day-use visitors may bring for a picnic or trail snack, or what campers may tote to eat at their campsites, a small subset of national parks today permit a surprising foodscape element: hunting, fishing, and foraging. Sixty-six areas managed by the NPS allow recreational hunting; seven Alaskan areas permit federal subsistence hunting through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA); Badlands National Park sanctions Tribal hunting; and one part of Grand Teton National Park, coordinating with the State of Wyoming, permits controlled elk reductions (US Department of the Interior 2017). Hunting, fishing, and foraging have had a fraught history on parklands, particularly for Indigenous people, a theme I treat in more depth in other chapters. Here, I focus my examination on the most visible park foodways, concessions.
The style of concessions that most park travelers today are familiar with originated during the Depression. The rustic and elegant grand lodges for which many parks are famous—including the Grand Canyon’s El Tovar (1905), Old Faithful Inn (1903–04) at Yellowstone, the Many Glacier Hotel (1915) at Glacier National Park, and Crater Lake Lodge (1915)—were built in the first two decades of the twentieth century. They catered to wealthy tourists who arrived at the parks by train, and they made steep profits by providing sightseeing trips around the parks to these travelers and by serving them in the grand dining rooms of the lodges. In the 1920s, the mass production of the automobile made travel affordable and accessible to a wider range of people, and middle-class tourists began to drive themselves to the parks. They didn’t need the sightseeing transportation of their wealthier predecessors, but they did need faster food in the far corners of the parks to which they could now travel independently. Hence, in the 1930s, concessioners began to invest in more cafeterias, grills, coffee shops, gift shops, and cabins to serve the growing number of visitors (Mantell 1979, 16).
The regulation of national park concessions has waxed and waned over the nearly 100 years since they started popping up like mushrooms after a rain. Park visitations climbed dramatically through the middle of the twentieth century, from 120,690 recreation visits in 1904, to 1,900,499 in 1925, to a whopping 32,706,172 in 1950, as the number of parks grew, and more and more Americans and international visitors made their way (National Park Service 2022c). Concessioners had great difficulty keeping up with demand, and the quality of their offerings declined, resulting in a period of strict regulation after World War II. Deterred by the hassles and expense of such regulation, many concessioners let their contracts expire, leaving the Department of the Interior unable to find new concessioners (Mantell 1979, 18n113). An agreement in 1950 and the later 1965 Concessions Policy Act provided a framework for concessions management, safeguarding concessioner investments and protecting the public from inflated prices and sub-par facilities. The 1965 Act helped to line the pockets of concessioners, insuring them against loss and underwriting their profit-generating capital investments within the park, and giving them preferable rights of renewal of their long-term quasi-monopoly contracts (Herman 1992, 45).
Critics have noted the role of concessioners in attracting visitors to the parks.
A concessioner cannot build a 500-room luxury hotel in the middle of a national park, hire a five-star gourmet chef to run the kitchen, promote it with slick color ads in the trendiest magazines, and then claim to be blameless when 1,000 people show up to stay there every night in the summer. Concessioners create demand, and they must be held accountable for its effects.
(Herman 1992, 37)
Seen in this light, the lackluster food of the national parks may be a boon for environmental preservation, as very few people are heading to the parks for the eats, at present. Still, even with limited foodie draw, national park foodways, largely circumscribed by corporate concessioners, shape and are shaped by projects of self-making that happen in the guise of romantic consumption. A case study of the concessions in America’s oldest national park promises to illuminate this phenomenon, but first, a question: who is park food for?