Trading

Think about the last meal you had. How did the food get from the field to your plate? The miles food travels before it reaches our mouths involve an astonishingly complex labyrinth of logistics, transportation, preservation, policy, and regulations. Food supplies in New York City today link a global system of predominantly industrial scale farming to the nation’s largest market at Hunts Point in the Bronx and from there to the supermarkets, bodegas, and food carts we depend on every day.

Over time, the distance between food production and consumption has both increased and become invisible, hiding the true costs of food. But these costs are high. Commercial food production’s main goal is to maximize returns: the economic incentives are stacked against sustainability, fairness in labor practices, and equitable access to healthy food.

Since the early 1800s, the city has had relatively inexpensive, high-quality, and diverse foods through a changing network of wholesale and retail nodes where food is sold. This section explores the processes that bring this food to us from places far and near. It also takes a look at possibilities for re-imagining and re-designing food transportation and distribution networks.

 

Biodiversity

Mechanized, industrialized crop production is the leading cause of the planetary loss of biodiversity. In order to increase output, growers are incentivized to use more fertilizers, pesticides, and other harmful agents, as well as more water and land. The United Nations has reported that profit-driven extensive agriculture is the main threat to 86% of the species at risk of extinction.

Intensive cultivation of a small number of crops and strains mean that most of us do not know that there are over 12,000 sub-species of corn; we are familiar only with a handful. The works in this section encourage us to think about how lesser-known crops might be resistant to droughts and weather events.

Screen:

Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann
Cargo
2017
Run time: 3:00 min
Courtesy of Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann

Left:

Concept and design by Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann, illustration by Magnús Ingvar Ágústsson
Banana Made In Label
2016
Paper and ink
Collection of Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann

Pedestal:

Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann
Banana Passport
2016
Paper and ink
Collection of Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann

How food is transported around the city matters. Diesel trucks are the main way that food is currently hauled to our restaurants, supermarkets, and by some popular web-based delivery services. These trucks create significant traffic problems, but more pressingly, they have scientifically proven to be a leading cause of the respiratory ailments in some of the city’s poorest communities, like Mott Haven in the South Bronx, where residents have organized to protect their health rights.

“Seeing a supermarket dumpster in Iceland filled with decent bananas left us in awe. Roughly 8,800 km (5,500 mi) away from their origin in Ecuador, yet taken for granted. We felt that under their spotless peels was a story to uncover. Global cargo shipping and human relations are intertwined in our proposition—a new language for alternative and actually informative ‘made in’ labels.” – Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Johanna Seelemann

 

Street Vendors

In the early 20th century, street vendors, many of them new immigrants, were an uncontrollable and annoying presence for authorities, living proof that the public market system could not satisfy a rapidly expanding city. In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia famously forced food pushcart vendors off the streets into a revamped system of indoor markets.

Today, street vendors and pushcarts offer relatively inexpensive food on-the-go, while allowing countless New Yorkers to make a living, including a significant number of women, immigrants, and Black people. There are thousands of street food vendors in New York City today, selling food from all over the world and at all hours to hungry New Yorkers and visitors.

Clockwise From Top Left:

Frederick Knecht Detwiller
Unemployed: Study of an Apple Woman Made from Life
1931
Lithograph
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Jean U. Koree, 32.162.16

Nicolino Calyo
The Butter and Milk Man
1840–1844
Watercolor and pencil on paper
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvan, 55.6.10

Albert Friscia
New York Milk Man
1937
Oil on canvas
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Lidia Di Bello Friscia, 99.80.4

Raymond Freemantle
October
c. 1931–1932
Watercolor on illustration board (Reproduction)
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Jordan Freemantle, 99.84.39

Victor Semon Perard
Hot Corn Man at Fulton Ferry
c. 1910
Etching
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Victor Perard, 51.268.20

Albert Potter
Pretzel Vendor
c. 1930
Etching
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Irving Potter, 87.62.11

 

Public Markets

The city’s founders considered food provisioning and distribution a public health utility that needed to be tightly controlled. Concerns about fair pricing, accessibility, and quality eventually led to the creation of a network of public markets that in theory were equally accessible to all. Up until the 1840s, public markets were the main legal place for consumers to buy fresh food in the city. Meat stalls were the anchoring feature of this system, for butchers could only sell their products within the city-owned public markets. 

Markets catalyzed real estate development wherever they opened. The markets also catered to the tastes of new arrivals. Although the markets paid for themselves, by the 1840s a desire for more free-market solutions pushed officials to end the tight regulation of the city’s food supply. As small stores sprang up, many of the old public markets closed. Most of the public markets that remained after deregulation were dedicated to wholesale, and their number kept dwindling throughout the years as the system became more centralized, with fewer, but larger, wholesale markets servicing the city. 

Two types of public markets remain open today: six retail markets operated by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, and the three wholesale Hunts Point markets (meat, produce, and fish) that are run as cooperatives.

Top Row, From Left:

Designed by Stephen D’Arrigo and Harold Cabot
Andy Boy Broccoli advertisement
1970
Color lithograph
Collection of D’Arrigo New York

Unknown maker
Ticket tracker from Hunts Point Market
1940s–1950s
Wood
Collection of D’Arrigo New York

Bottom Right:

Unknown maker
Diorama of the Fly Market
c. 1935–1939
Stained plywood exterior with painted wooden interior
Museum of the City of New York. Made at the Museum for the City of New York by the U.S. Works Progress Administration, 39.414

New York’s first dedicated market, the Fly Market, was established around 1700 in what today is Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan. At its peak during the 1820s, the city’s food network counted around a dozen markets, all below Houston Street. Today the city owns only six public retail markets, most of them dating to Mayor La Guardia’s era: Essex Market (the Lower East Side), La Marqueta (East Harlem), Moore Street Market (East Williamsburg), the Arthur Avenue Market (Belmont), Jamaica Market (Eastern Queens), and the Thirteenth Avenue Retail Market (Borough Park).

Screen:

THIRTEEN
How NYC Is Protecting Its Main Food Supply?
2018
Run time: 1:42 min
Courtesy of the WNET Group

Hunts Point handles more food than any other distribution center in the nation—4.5 billion tons of food for the region, and roughly 2.3 billion tons of food for New York City each year. Hunts Point accounts for 45% of the fish, 35% of the meat, and 25% of the produce consumed in the city. It also remains a critical point of economic activity, employing 8,500 people. In addition to servicing restaurants, supermarkets, fresh markets, and bodegas, Hunts Point also services cash and carry wholesalers. 

The three Hunts Point food cooperatives—handling meat, produce, and fish—are heirs to the system of public markets dating to late colonial times.

 

Meat

New York City has been called “the meatiest city in the nation.” This distinction dates back to the early 1800s, when, on average, each New Yorker ate an astounding 139 pounds of meat per year and butchers were among the most powerful monopolies operating in the city. Slaughterhouses were a necessary component of the city’s meat industry, but nobody wanted to live near one. The foul smells, flies, noise, and excrement made the trade—then as today—a hazard to the environment.

Today, we know that meat production is one of the greatest sources of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and alternatives to meat are becoming common. The conversation around the future of meat is central to a more sustainable food system.

Above:

Steve Ellis
Chrysler Meat Slicer
2007
Oil on canvas
Collection of the artist

Far Left:

George Augustus
Preparing for the holiday banquets in Washington Market on the arrival of game meats from the West
1882
Reproduction
De Luan/Alamy Stock Photo

Left:

Unknown maker
Bull’s Head Tavern in 1783
Undated
Watercolor on paper
Museum of the City of New York. The J. Clarence Davies Collection. Gift of J. Clarence Davies, 29.100.2775

The deregulation of the butchers’ monopoly in 1843 triggered the slow decline of public food markets in New York City. In late colonial and early republican eras, slaughterhouses were mostly located along the Bowery. Cattle was brought from all over the region to be slaughtered at Bull’s Head Tavern, one of the oldest of these establishments, it served both as a tavern and a slaughterhouse.

Below, Case:

Studio Marije Vogelzang

Biccio Sushi
Herbast Stir Fry Chops
Sapicu Breast
Ponti Tails

2022
Polymer clay

Herbast Stir Fry Chops poster
Biccio Sushi poster
Ponti Tails poster
Sapicu Breast poster

2016
Paper and ink

Courtesy of Marije Vogelzang

None of these animals are real. Marije Vogelzang presents pieces of fake meat coming from fictional animals. The artist invites us to think about what is and is not natural, to ponder how the environment impacts the animals that are eaten, and to question our traditional meat-eating habits.

“A copy is always inferior. Look at a van Gogh painting and at a copy. They might look the same but their value is different. Vegetarian alternatives can help people lead a more sustainable lifestyle, still the literal copies of meat you find in the supermarket will never live up to the original. Even if the original is actually inferior.” – Marije Vogelzang

 

Pablo Delano
Soy Vaquero y de Bayamón
c. 1985
Pigment print
Museum of the City of New York. Museum purchase, 2022.7.1

"The novelty license plate in the center of this photo refers to Los Vaqueros de Bayamón (the Cowboys of Bayamón), one of the professional Winter League baseball teams in Puerto Rico. I love the specific wording, which states ‘I am a Cowboy, and from Bayamón.’” – Pablo Delano

 

Pedestal:

Thomas W. Commeraw
Jug with handle
1797–1819
Stoneware
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Henry Hershkowitz, 2018.15.6

When visiting the city’s public markets in the 19th century, shoppers needed containers to carry their oysters, preserved fruits, oil, and other foodstuffs home. These vessels were reusable and usually made of stoneware or other durable material. Thomas Commeraw was a free African-American potter who established his kiln in 1797 in Corlears Hook on the East River in Manhattan (just south of today’s Williamsburg Bridge). After his business was closed following a dispute, Commeraw became a colonist leader in Sierra Leone during the 1820s, but returned to the United States after two years of hardship, forced displacement, and the death of his wife.

 

Sugar

For many years New York City was at the center of the nation’s sugar industry. New York’s first refinery opened in 1730 and by 1860 there were 60. By 1887, New York processed around 70% of the country’s sugar and it was the city’s most profitable manufacturing industry. The easy availability of locally refined sugar also turned the city into a center of sugary soft-drink production, rum, and candy-making (such as Tootsie Rolls, invented in New York in 1907).

The global history of sugar also reeks of empire, violence, and exploitation. Initially, sugar cane was imported from the Caribbean, where it was cultivated by enslaved people under brutal conditions, and it was central in the city’s role within the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

By the 1950s, sugar had lost its place in the city as part of the general deindustrialization of the region. The last refinery, Domino Sugar, closed in 2004.

From Top:

William Wade and T. Pollock
R. L. & A. Stuart’s Steam Sugar Refinery on Greenwich, Chambers and Reade Streets, New York
c. 1850
Line engraving (Reproduction)
Museum of the City of New York. The J. Clarence Davies Collection. Gift of J. Clarence Davies, 29.100.2117

Unknown maker
Slave kitchen in the Bergen house
c. 1900
Albumen print (Reproduction)
Museum of the City of New York, X2010.11.7898

Like many other wealthy and illustrious New York families, the Bergens of Brooklyn owned enslaved people. Cooking and eating separately was one of the many ways to mark the difference between the free and the enslaved. The Bergen family’s house in the Greenwood section of Brooklyn had living quarters for the enslaved, including this kitchen, which probably became the main meeting place for the enslaved members of the household; a place of communion, of preserving and passing traditions, and potentially of resistance.

Case:

Unknown maker
Rum pitcher
17th century
Leather
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Robert Swartwout Talmage, 38.75.2

Unknown maker
Sugar cutter
19th century
Steel and wood
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Mrs. T. Matlack Cheesman, 41.23.2