Nourishing Networks

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians--Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class--gathered in public to feed the city. In Nourishing Networks, historian Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group gained and lost determined the success of their businesses, the well-being of their families, and their ability to shape food retail and local laws to meet their needs. Nourishing Networks vividly depicts a city that throughout its history has struggled to feed its population safely and affordably, and in documenting those challenges, it offers lessons for building a better food future.

Ashley Rose Young is the American History Curator in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. She is also a Smithsonian Research Associate and was formerly the Historian of the Smithsonian Food History Project at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A curator and public historian, she has written for the New York Times and and Washington Post, among other outlets.