Tofu Curtain

The term was coined in Massachusetts to identify trends on either side of a county line in the Pioneer Valley along the Connecticut River, and has also been widely used similarly with regards to gentrifying neighborhoods in Melbourne, Australia.

[6] While this southern part of the Massachusetts' Pioneer Valley is the second largest metropolitan region in the state, areas of it are economically depressed, with a deficit of available jobs and significantly lower household incomes.

[7] Meanwhile, the more rural and collegiate areas to the north are home to a preponderance of worker cooperatives and small businesses that often manufacture and sell natural products (such as tofu) to a more affluent population.

Despite the presence of a wealthy college and huge university, an estimated 30-40% of students in the Amherst-Pelham school district qualified for free or reduced lunches in 2017 due to living in low-income households.

[14] The assertion that there is a Tofu Curtain has also been a rallying point for people living and working on both sides of the county line to create equitable systems of food sovereignty, workplace democracy, and environmental justice as means to destratify the region economically while uniting it politically.

[8][15][16] In a 2022 interview with WRSI radio, Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster called the Tofu Curtain "an imagined line" that can be "problematic" and "over-simplifying" in its attempts to define a region and its people.

In 2018 Australia's fossil fuel industry took advantage of the nickname by volleying the term pejoratively in attempts to divide Green Party and Labor activists from organizing together against expansion of coal mining and gas drilling.

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