“A seething mass of rottenness”: regulating food and the landscape of modern New York

ABSTRACT

The foodways and landscape of New York were both transformed in the modern era, with new forms of regulation needed to discipline the teeming city. These transformations happened jointly, as foodways were understood as a primary and integral aspect of the city’s landscape. In particular, the foodways of New York’s immigrants came under increasing regulation, most notably in “The Pushcart Wars,” which characterized the immigrant and his food as a pestilential presence on the urban landscape. This joint culinary and landscape reform typifies the divergent sensibilities and constituencies that worked to fashion New York according to emergent conceptions of the modern city.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant foodways
• pushcarts
• New York City
• modernity
• domestic science movement
• the production of space
• literary/cultural studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On landscape, see Scobey, Empire City; Ward and Zunz, The Landscape of Modernity. On food, see Carroll, Three Squares; Haley, Turning the Tables; Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food.

2. See Fritz, “Lizzie Black Kander”; Gabacccia, We Are What We Eat; Veit, Moral Food.

3. See Halley, Turning the Tables; Lobel, Urban Appetites.

4. See Hoy, Chasing Dirt; Strasser, Never Done.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rocco Marinaccio

Rocco Marinaccio is Professor of English and Director of the Liberal Arts and Science Core Curriculum at Manhattan College in New York City. He works primarily in nineteenth- through twenty-first century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on food studies, Italian American culture, and urban studies. He has published in a variety of scholarly journals and essay collections. The current essay is drawn from his research into foodways and constructions of modernity and postmodernity, as also represented by his recent publication on Don DeLillo and postmodern foodways, in LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory.