MOVABLE MARKETS: FOOD WHOLESALING IN THE 20TH-CENTURY CITY

摘要

I teach a class that aspires to interest students in exploring how places they see in their everyday environments came to be. Why are they there? How have they changed over time? What is their palimpsest? Few landscapes are the result of specific design and planning decisions about that function or place. Rather, many are the result of multiple decisions made over time-made to improve activities deemed necessary or desirable. The evolution of fresh produce marketing in the United States is a good example. Changes in regulations, transportation, and economics have left residual places and spaces in our cities. But perhaps the most influential agent of change was the expanding roles of middlemen. As a frequent traveler, introducing landscape architecture and architecture students to European city centers, I see twenty-somethings connect with street produce markets and market squares as normal places to purchase fresh, seasonal produce. Many of these young adults have limited exposure to U.S. farmers' markets, often associating them as social spaces for expensive boutique shopping rather than everyday places to buy food. My experience revealed four things about the students, and by extension their cultural circles: (1) Many have limited experience with locally sourced, fresh produce; (2) Many don't really know where their food comes from; (3) Few know how food comes to arrive at the places where they purchase it; and (4) Most know little of the places where produce is marketed or processed. Helen Tangires, the administrator of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has been addressing the last three gaps of knowledge in her research over the past few decades. Her first book, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (2003), followed the making and use of public food markets as places where farmers-those growing food-sold their produce to local consumers. Public Markets and Civic Culture provides a densely written insight into the physical public marketplaces, how they came to be, and how they worked within the city's urban form and daily culture. Her meticulous research details the making and use of public food markets as places for farmers to sell their produce and meats directly to urban residents. Public Markets and Civic Culture was the first comprehensive source documenting public markets in the United States and their place in civic culture.