Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York by Cindy R. Lobel (review)

“New York became a food city when it became a metropolis,” explains Cindy R. Lobel at the beginning of Urban Appetites. In her well-researched study of Gotham’s nineteenth-century food industry—the people and places involved in food production, transportation, marketing, sale, and consumption—she proves that the reverse was also true. New York City’s development into the nation’s largest and most cosmopolitan city was thoroughly interwoven with, and reliant on, the sophistication of its food system. Telling the story of food in New York City requires a history of the metropolis itself as a constructed urban space.

Lobel organizes her history both chronologically and thematically, beginning in the Early Republic and ending with the Gilded Age. Each chapter attends to a specific site—market, restaurant, home—during an era of transformation crucial to that setting. The story opens in the public markets that fed New York during its first decades as an American port, when residents lived and shopped in a city of walkable scale. New York’s food culture remained sensitive to the seasons, with market offerings that were multifarious but essentially fragile. Yellow fever outbreaks and severe storms posed regular yet unexpected threats to urban tables.

Much changed with advances in the region’s transportation infrastructure and food preservation technologies during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The Erie Canal, steam ferries, and the invention of the ice cutter in 1827 expanded New Yorkers’ appetites far beyond their previous reaches. The sheer size of antebellum New York and the pace with which it grew prompted major agricultural and environmental developments in the city’s backyard and far beyond. Farmers planted wheat for Gotham bakers hundreds of miles away. As the city stretched northward on Manhattan, public markets yielded to private butcher shops and grocers. Such a shift, Lobel argues, spoke to larger ideological trends in Jacksonian America. Debates over the value of artisan labor, increasing immigration, and a new laissez-faire economic ethos erupted in New York City’s corner butcher shops just as they did at the highest levels of American commerce.

Explosive growth and deregulation bore inequitable and unhealthful fruit. As wealthy residents moved uptown and poor immigrants clustered downtown, distinctions emerged between classes who shopped indoors at tidy, private groceries and those forced to buy out-doors at peddlers’ carts or from Five Points’ notorious “liquor grocers.” New York’s increasing social stratification registered in both geography and food. Deregulation had more explicitly unsavory consequences, too, as during the midcentury “swill milk” scandal, when dairy producers thinned milk with alcohol, chalk, and eggs. New York’s descent into corrupt machine politics could be tasted in the contaminated milk that sickened city children.

The book’s major themes emerge in its first half: New York City’s transition from a regulated, public food economy to a deregulated, private one; its shift from essentially local, preindustrial systems of food production and distribution to more far-flung, highly industrialized ones; and the very tangible effects of such changes on the quality of New Yorkers’ food. Arguments related to the industrialization of agriculture, transportation, and commerce will be familiar to readers of William Cronon, Richard White, and Sven Beckert.¹ And readers most interested in the transformations of New York’s public markets, the butchery trade, and their relation to Early Republic political philosophies should look forward to the publication of Gergely Baics’s dissertation, “Feeding Gotham: Urban Provisioning in Early New York, 1780–1860,” which Lobel’s first few chapters recommend.²

Lobel’s most significant scholarly interventions involve two correctives within the early era of her study. First, she argues for a reinterpretation of New York City’s early public markets as socially stratified spaces. Everyone shopped at the...