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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