Feeding Gotham

“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.

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