| Public markets are definitive parts of the urban landscape. Policies shaping municipal food provisioning, including public markets, produce and reproduce differentiated subjects and unevenly developed spaces. Social science has not paid sustained attention to public food markets; this research contributes to a fragmented and multi-perspective body of work that demonstrates the many ways in which markets intersect with urban processes. I look at the geographic distribution of food in and through New York City's public markets from 1930 to the present by mapping intersections of politics, citizens, consumers, social class, gender, ethnicity, race, government, capital, and the retailing landscape. Tracing these processes over more than a century, this study demonstrates that food distribution is a dynamic and highly contested aspect of urban life, underscoring a deep if sometimes under-articulated recognition of the work done by the flow of food through city streets.;Focused on New York City's public markets, particularly the enclosed retail markets built in the late 1930s and early 1940s to contain New York City's pushcarts and street peddlers, this study explores how the immigrant working classes became the objects of municipal food policy. Food habits became a means through which to Americanize – and civilize – the masses. Along with their bodies, their food landscapes became the targets of state intervention. Working class neighborhoods were – and are – vulnerable to state interventions that too often further alienate already disempowered populations.;Food policy has the potential to advance social justice. In New York City, we are witnessing the emergence of a new municipal food policy, which, if implemented, will be the first comprehensive policy to be proposed since the Progressive Era. Aimed at reducing inequities and improving public health, and integrated with broad goals of environmental and economic sustainability, the proposals on the table point in promising directions. |
