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Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Gergely Baics. Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1610–1611, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1610
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Progressive reformers and historical researchers have documented the deep inequalities of nineteenth-century urbanization, including the relative lack of adequate housing, water, and sewage in New York City tenements, but, until recently, scholars largely neglected that other basic human need—access to food. In this important book, Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, 1790–1860, Gergely Baics develops digital tools of economic and spatial analysis to map the rise of food inequality during the transition from early republican public markets to antebellum free trade. Although historians have generally attributed the 1843 deregulation of New York City food markets to liberal ideologies associated with the “market revolution,” Baics adds that deregulation also reflected a change of priorities in urban infrastructure from food to water, a point demonstrated by the opening of the Croton aqueduct just one year earlier. He explains this shift by noting that, even as food became increasingly inaccessible to poor New Yorkers, a focus on other environmental determinants of public health made food largely invisible to city officials—and to subsequent historians.
