The Long Way from Farm to Table: The Evolution of the United States’ Wholesale Food Business

The development of wholesale markets fundamentally changed food provisioning in the United States. Because of this system, food today may travel around the world before it is eaten, requiring handling by untold numbers of workers and companies as well as technologies to safely store and transport it. Cities are tied up in the story of global food supply chains, as they are the endpoint for the majority of consumption. The transition to food provisioning via wholesale markets was a dramatic shift that is important for understanding food systems today, yet, with few exceptions, the new and growing subfield of food systems planning has not much examined its history. Movable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City, by Helen Tangires, shrinks this gap by documenting the forms and spatial layouts of evolving wholesale markets across the United States over the course of the twentieth century. Tangires’ first book documented a proliferation of food retail stores in nineteenth-century cities as a result of deregulation. This sequel explores the rise of food wholesalers to supply these retail outlets. More specifically, the book investigates how, after food provisioning evolved into an activity that took up ample (and valuable) real estate, cities extricated wholesale markets from their downtowns and reconstructed them as invisible and peripheral to the city’s infrastructure. Tangires argues that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) “was the ‘visible hand’ that guaranteed the movable feast” (p. 14) by setting the conditions and orchestrating resources in order to shift the wholesaling food system into developments designed from scratch for the modern era. To tell this story, Tangires focuses on the role that the USDA played in the fight over the future of the urban wholesale market. The depth of research is extensive and often includes fascinating images and illustrations of USDA’s work. Tangires characterizes the development of food wholesale provisioning in terms of three eras, which also make up the three parts of the book. Each chapter provides examples from various cities, with the arcs of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore wholesale markets described in bits and pieces throughout. A wide range of terms are used to refer to actors in the wholesale sector, reflecting the diversity of people involved in the industry and the dramatic shifts it underwent. The terms are primarily undefined, in part, because they were inconsistently used historically and because they evolved over time. Nonetheless, it can add confusion. The story primarily features white men, and Tangires notes their xenophobic Journal of Planning History