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

Business historians looking for fresh insights into the political economy of urban food provisioning in the Early Republic may be disappointed in Feeding Gotham. Baics sets out to show what happened when New York City’s highly regulated markets transitioned into a free-market system by the mid-nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, he finds that such a maneuver “was not an inevitable outcome, but the result of specific policy choices” (234) that resulted in a diffuse and unequal marketplace operated by unregulated wholesalers, grocers, and peddlers. Baics’s volume, therefore, is perhaps best appreciated for its dynamic use of geographic information system (GIS) mapping, along with the application of rhythm analysis and central place theory, to provide a fine-grained look at how public markets functioned (or did not) at ground level. It is in this way that Baics offers business historians food for thought.

Baics’s analysis centers primarily on meat provisioning and the ways in which the city’s licensed butchers supplied New Yorkers with a relatively high standard of proteins in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the records of the New York Common Council, he is able to demonstrate how, beginning in 1843, the city shifted its municipal goals from food to water, choosing to funnel significant resources instead into the Croton Aqueduct, and deregulating and discontinuing maintenance of its public market system. Baics suggests that in so doing, “the deregulation of food markets exacerbated existing environmental hazards by introducing another layer of structural inequality in residents’ access to basic resources” (231). According to Baics, grocery stores, cart vendors, and other retailers in the unregulated informal economy provided foodstuffs of lower quality, quantity, and variety than did the centralized markets. Using GIS, he plots the locations of the city’s public markets and grocery stores in relationship to residential populations, mapping the geography of commerce to show how retail markets serviced neighborhoods in predicable patterns (extensive appendices explain both his methodology and sources). As might be expected, what Baics finds are that large numbers of food shops often were clustered in densely populated—and often lower-income—areas, thinning among upper-income districts, where domestics could take on the demanding time and labor of daily shopping in the days before home refrigeration. “The composite picture that emerges by mid-century,” he notes, “is a fragmented and differentiated geography, in which residential location by and large determined one’s options of daily food access” (186). In Baics’s estimation, this shift could be seen as a retail revolution of sorts, with varying and contradictory outcomes experienced throughout the supply chain.

While such conclusions may not surprise most historians of retail commerce, Baics’s point is that in the switch to an unregulated food market system, “layers of inequality” (202) abounded, resulting in the kind of structural disparity in nineteenth-century housing and sanitation conditions historians have detailed previously. Such a conclusion calls into question the meaning and significance of what is a public good, and who provides such resources and under what conditions. One of Baics’s major aims is to detail “the profound consequences that the deregulation of food markets had on the built environment of the city, and the daily lives and living standards of its residents” (235). Baics’s is not playing the blame game; rather, he suggests: “The problem was not so much with deregulation but rather with the failure to impose any institutional measure to offset its negative consequences” (235). Pointing to Barcelona’s still-thriving public markets, Baics questions whether New York missed an opportunity to continue defining food access as a public good, but ultimately concludes that the answer is not as relevant as the lessons that might be learned about the nature of historical contingency and the social, economic, and political impacts of key policy decisions.

Given this...