The untold story of America's wholesale food business.
In nineteenth-century America, municipal deregulation of the butcher
trade and state-incorporated market companies gave rise to a flourishing
wholesale trade. In Movable Markets, Helen Tangires describes the
evolution of the American wholesale marketplace for fresh food, from its
development as a bustling produce district in the heart of the city to
its current indiscernible place in food industrial parks on the urban
periphery.
Tangires follows the middlemen, those intermediaries who became
functional necessities as the railroads accelerated the process of
delivering perishable food to the city. Tracing their rise and decline
in the wake of a deregulated food economy, she asks: How did these
people, who occupied such key roles as food distributors and suppliers
to the retail trade, end up exiled to urban outskirts? Moving into the
early twentieth century, she explains how progressive city planners and
agricultural economists responded to anxieties about the high cost of
living, traffic congestion, and disruptions in the food supply by
questioning the centrality, aging infrastructure, and organizational
structure of wholesale markets.
Tangires combines economic and cultural history by analyzing popular
literature, innovative scholarship, and USDA publications. Detailing the
legal, physical, and organizational means behind the complex exodus of
food wholesaling from the urban core, Tangires also reveals how the
trade adjusted to life beyond the city limits as it created new channels
of distribution, product lines, and markets. Readers interested in US
history, city and regional planning history, food history, and public
policy, as well as anyone curious about the disappearance of the central
produce district as a major component of the city, will find Movable
Markets a fascinating read.
