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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Just Provisions: Food, Identity, and Contested Space in Urban America, 1800-1875 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4gk6g2v8 Author Branch, Michelle Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Just Provisions: Food, Identity, and Contested Space in Urban America, 1800-1875 by Michelle Nicole Branch A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY Committee in Charge: Professor David M. Henkin, Chair Professor James Vernon Professor Paul Groth Fall 2012 Just Provisions: Food, Identity, and Contested Space in Urban America, 1800-1875 © 2012 by Michelle Nicole Branch Abstract Just Provisions: Food, Identity, and Contested Space in Urban America, 1800-1875 by Michelle Nicole Branch Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California at Berkeley Professor David M. Henkin, Chair In nineteenth-century cities, men and women, black and white, rich and poor, engaged with the urban food system in ways that extended beyond the primary purpose of consumption and distribution. How and to what extent did food provisioning spaces advance beyond a utilitarian goal to feed urban populations to become sites for imagining, expressing, and achieving social aims? What cultural histories of alimentary spaces can be told during antebellum America’s dramatic turn toward urban life? “Just Provisions” seeks to explore answers to those questions by investigating antebellum food provisioning and its politics of identity and space. Urban residents challenged the existing provisioning structure to create a food marketing system they considered more inclusive, fair, and representative—in a word, more just. In so doing, they transformed not only the food markets, but also related food systems and institutions: street vending, eating-house establishments, restaurants, and Northern market procurement practices. In questioning the existing structure, they further inserted themselves into the urban public discourse on the place of blacks, women, and immigrants in the new republic. As they lobbied for legitimate inclusion in public space, residents sought to disrupt the codes and patterns of the traditional marketing system. If food markets regulated social life according to one vision of an ordered society, alternative food spaces offered competing perspectives and different opportunities to envision public life. In considering forms of marketing beyond official markets, “Just Provisions” seeks to create histories of street vending and free produce markets, and to extend scholarship about public food markets and restaurant culture—and the people who frequented those spaces. Simply put, residents looked to markets for not only nutritional, but social needs. To view the antebellum urban food provisioning system from a broader perspective that looks beyond the official markets is to observe that food provisioning was more than simply an efficient means to feed the masses. Food provisioning also touched social justice values. Markets not only provided sustenance, but also the potential for sociability and a respectable path into public space and public discourse—especially for blacks, women, and immigrants. For that reason, members of these groups pushed for changes to the restrictive public markets while simultaneously enacting change in other food provisioning landscapes that promised better opportunity. Significant numbers of antebellum residents longed for better economic chances, greater respectability, more 1 freedom of movement, and a food system that matched their ethical values. They pursued these desires in the market house, but also in the streets, eating houses and restaurants, and alternative market systems that existed in the shadow of the official market houses themselves. “Just Provisions” proceeds by looking at four different types of food spaces in cities. Its chapters consider broader definitions and alternative propositions to the market-house structure. Adding research about street vending, eating houses, and free produce markets to research about marketing infrastructure can illuminate further contours to the politics of identity and space shaped by food. Likewise, interrogating the definitions of the market as a traditional institution provides a glimpse into another dimension of urban public life, not only about the spaces themselves, but also about relationships and activities that occurred there. The cases explored here show urban residents pushing at the boundaries of the market model, seeking to create a more fair, inclusive, and just provisioning system. They argued that to be truly inclusive, the market model required modifications across multiple dimensions. In the process, blacks, women, immigrants, and members of the lower classes offered a different perspective on what full civic inclusion could look like. 2 Dedication Page to Dale Cook i Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Food Provisioning Spaces as Gateways to Broader Social Inclusion ......................................... 1 Economic Development of the Antebellum Urban Marketing System ....................................... 2 Social and Cultural Narrative of the Antebellum Urban Marketing System .............................. 7 The Integrated Urban Provisioning Structure and Antebellum Social and Cultural Life ......... 14 Importance of African-American Emancipation to Urban Food Provisioning ......................... 17 Historiography of Urban Food Provisioning ............................................................................. 22 A Note on Methodology and Sources ....................................................................................... 25 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 28 Chapter 1—City Public Markets: Constructing and Managing Difference ......................... 29 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 29 Fragmented Time, Space, and Experience ................................................................................ 30 Changing Identities in the Marketplace .................................................................................... 35 Developing Perspective by Transacting in Food ....................................................................... 38 The Public Markets as Sites for Surveying and Showcasing Character ................................... 41 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 49 Chapter 2—Mobile Markets: Street Vending, Difference, and Conflict ............................... 51 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 51 Street Vending as Vernacular Markets ...................................................................................... 52 Enacting Criminal Legislation Against Vendors ...................................................................... 60 New Attitudes Toward Vendors Following Legislative Change .............................................. 67 Pushcart Commission Report .................................................................................................... 71 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 73 Chapter 3—Urban Eateries: Promiscuity, Anxiety, and Waiters .......................................... 75 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 75 The Rise of Hotel Dining Rooms and Independent Eating Houses .......................................... 75 “Community of Feeling,” Identity, and Public Eating .............................................................. 79 Anxieties Produced by Public Eating ........................................................................................ 86 The Division of Labor in Eating Spaces ................................................................................... 92 ii The Ascension of Waiters’ Unions ......................................................................................... 102 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 104 Chapter 4—A Free Produce Network: Promoting Labor-Conscious Markets .................. 105 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 105 How the New Urban Eating Culture Relied on Slave Produce ............................................... 108 Tenets and Beliefs of the Free Produce Network .................................................................... 110 Structure and Design of the Free Produce Network ...............................................................