Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860 by Gergely Baics (review)

"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," goes the maxim of French writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. In Feeding Gotham, however, Gergely Baics is less interested in the what of nineteenth-century New Yorkers' diets than the how. How did Early Republic and antebellum New Yorkers shop for food? What kinds of retail outlets were available to them and how did shoppers use them? Why did the process of provisioning matter to the history of New York City and its inhabitants? This is not a history of food, Baics is careful to note, but of food access (8). With exhaustive research presented in an array of GIS-generated formats, Baics shows how evolving food access had lasting repercussions for New York's neighborhoods and the people who inhabited them.

Studying food access in an era of explosive growth—New York's population expanded almost 27-fold within the frame of his study—leads Baics to track the rise and fall of the antebellum city's municipally-managed market system. At the turn of the nineteenth century, urban residents, market vendors, and city officials collaborated to create Gotham's public markets. Markets functioned as distinct social worlds as they integrated themselves into the fabric of neighborhood life. New Yorkers of all classes shopped daily and vendors fought for prime stalls to attract their attention. Peddlers orbited the markets' bounds, extending food retail opportunities to the city's poorer consumers. As Gotham's population and footprint grew, private retailers opened storefronts in new neighborhoods, touting specialized wares and flexible hours. Municipal markets declined, bereft of public support, with mixed results for city eaters.

Feeding Gotham tells of the progressive deregulation of New York's public markets during decades of increasing regulation of other resources, such as water and housing. How and why did city officials and residents agree on food access as a public good early in the century only to let it fall permanently out of authorities' purview just a few decades later? Historians might be tempted to slot this development into broad trends, like "some impersonal market revolution" or the rise of "free-market ideology," Baics acknowledges (52, 24). But he finds a different story at play: one of contingencies and "subtle shifts in popular ideology, consumer preferences, and business attitudes" (52). An 1832 cholera epidemic, recession in the 1830s and 1840s, and the transition of public resources from food to water supply converged to remove municipal markets from the city's agenda (47-48). Deregulation of public markets had lasting consequences for the city's poor, who suffered from sparser shopping options that offered poor quality food. "[T]he public market system's demise…was not an inevitable outcome," Baics concludes, "but the result of specific policy choices, whether conscious or unconscious" (233-234). Contingencies make history, this book reminds the reader, in the realm of food provisioning as elsewhere.

Scholars of food, culture, and environment in nineteenth-century New York now have a substantial literature on which to draw. Feeding Gotham joins Cindy R. Lobel's Urban Appetites (Chicago, 2014), Catherine McNeur's Taming Manhattan (Harvard, 2014), and Andrew P. Haley Turning the Tables (North Carolina, 2011). Baics places his study at the intersection of urban, economic, and social history, citing studies of urban food systems planning and public markets in the United States and Europe.

What surely distinguishes Feeding Gotham is Baics's expert use of GIS to interpret and present his findings. Market vendor fees, data from censuses and city directories, and a variety of private and public records take vibrant form in dozens of maps, tables, and other representations, many in full color. "GIS mapping provides a theoretical framework, a methodological approach, and an empirical base on which the book's analysis rests," Baics writes (11). While it could be debated whether every representation is equally...