A Tale of (Feeding) Two Cities

The history of American foodways has come a long way since Richard Cummings published The American and His Food in 1940. While food history long struggled for legitimacy, a trickle of historians began to take food seriously as a subject of study by the 1990s. Since then, food history has come into its own and a host of studies have explored a variety of subtopics from the history of cookbooks to African American and immigrant foodways. With these two books, Gergely Baics and Kelly Erby add to this growing historiography. Feeding Gotham offers a quantitative study of the supply side of New York's system of provisioning including its public markets and private retail food shops. Restaurant Republic examines the consumer side, specifically the development of Boston's restaurant sector as an important part of the city's public culture.

While divergent in their methodologies, the two books cover similar ground in terms of their narrative trajectory: the nodes of food access grew considerably in the nineteenth century but the benefits were not spread evenly. In the case of New York, deregulation of the city's markets led to a decline in the quality of the food supply for poorer New Yorkers and increased disparities in food access. In the case of Boston, dining out became part and parcel of urban life and touched almost all Bostonians in one way or another. But restaurants also served to segment the population along class, gender, and sometimes ethnic lines. Thus, both books shed important light on the process of urbanization and the interplay between food and the social structure of American cities in a formative period of development.

Feeding Gotham documents and assesses the impact of the shift in Manhattan from a highly regulated public market system in the early national period to an unregulated system in the decades before the Civil War. Early national New York inherited a regulatory system established by the Montgomerie Charter of 1730. Neighborhood residents sponsored markets through subscription and the city authorized their construction. The Common Council also licensed market butchers and leased stalls to them on an annual basis. Stakeholders—vendors, customers, and city officials—viewed the markets as a public good. And, as Baics shows, the markets succeeded in providing an adequate food supply to New Yorkers across the social scale. In effect, the Common Council ensured equitable food access by determining that market houses and provisioning stalls would be evenly distributed throughout the city.

As the city grew, New Yorkers moved away from the older neighborhood markets and demanded retail food options closer to their homes. By the 1830s consumers also began to chafe at market fees and regulations that, they argued, limited competition among vendors and drove up food prices. Throughout the 1830s, private retail food shops began to open in the newer areas of the city, taking advantage of loopholes that allowed private vendors (especially butchers) to sell food outside of the markets in underserved areas. Meanwhile, even as the city grew, the municipal government stopped sponsoring new public markets and, in 1843, responded to consumers' and reformers' demands to deregulate the markets altogether. The shift to a laissez-faire attitude toward the markets, therefore, was related not just to impersonal market forces as historians of the "market revolution" have suggested, but rather reflected changing popular attitudes in favor a free market system.

The public markets did not disappear. The largest of them—Fulton and Washington—shifted to a primarily wholesale function and neighborhood markets continued to operate, in competition with private meat shops. A patchwork of private food shops replaced the organized market system, with locations determined by market forces rather than city mandate. While market regulations had encouraged even distribution of food throughout the settled areas of the city...