Movable Markets

Historians have had relatively little to say about wholesale markets in general, or food wholesalers in particular. Helen Tangires seeks to address this lacuna by asking and answering key questions about the transformation of the wholesale trade in agricultural products from one “rooted in the city's infrastructure and political economy to an industry whose wholesale sector operates on the urban periphery” (p. 6). Focusing primarily on two types of “shelter,” one regulatory and the other the physical spaces under which trade is conducted, Tangires offers a study of twentieth-century food wholesaling spaces that helps situate the grocery trade and its development over the past one hundred years squarely within the larger global economy. The result is a “history of food wholesaling in the context of federalism” and state authority that “marked a shift in food systems planning as primarily a municipal responsibility” (p. 142). Expanding her previous work on nineteenth-century public markets, Tangires approaches this study through the histories of food, urban spaces, the built environment, and economic geography, while tracking changes to wholesale produce markets “as an architectural form” (p. 9). The book's organization mirrors its argument. Divided into three sections—“Open Entry,” “Consolidation,” and “New Frontiers”—it traces several major U.S. urban markets (New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.) and a few minor ones as the trade grappled with local, state, and federal regulatory agencies’ intervention into what largely had been a diffuse collection of independent operators. Tangires argues in part that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Usda) (and its predecessor, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics) “helped reconfigure the food map” by encouraging the construction of centralized produce markets that would consolidate independent wholesalers under one roof outside of downtown, thereby easing traffic congestion and sanitary conditions in the city, freeing downtown real estate, and promoting more efficient and effective trade between farmers, intermediaries, and consumers (p. 14). “The Usda,” Tangires maintains, “was the ‘visible hand’ that guaranteed the moveable feast,” even if federal-level support, especially during the New Deal era, was “uneven and had mixed effects depending on local circumstances” (pp. 14, 172

Agriculture · Argument (complex analysis · Business · Consolidation (business · Context (archaeology · Economics · Economy · Food security · Food systems · Geography · State (computer science · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Organic Food and Agriculture

• Bibliography of urban history 2020

  Open Access•Andrew McTominey•Urban History•2020

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