Public food markets were once the lifeblood of the city. Trade there shaped the everyday sights and sounds of the nineteenth-century city center, the connections between city and countryside, and the character of adjacent local businesses. Émile Zola, writing in 1873, could rightfully describe Les Halles food market as “the belly of Paris.” By the end of the twentieth century, however, wholesale markets were hidden in suburban peripheries, in “industrial parks,” and most consumers experienced food retailing in private supermarkets. Around 1970, for example, Paris closed Les Halles in the city center, bulldozing the site to build a shopping mall, and moved its fish and produce wholesaling out into the southern suburbs at Rungis. Everyday Parisian food shoppers would have to find solace in the rise of the new “hypermarché” Carrefour. Movable Markets tells the story of this “geographical realignment of the marketplace for fresh food from the central produce district to planned food terminals” as it played out first in the United States and was exported later around the world (p. 223).

Helen Tangires, a market historian and administrator at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery of Art, is uniquely qualified to narrate this story. She has a personal connection to the history of public markets: her grandfather ran a lunch stand, Jim's Lunch, at the old Marsh Market in Baltimore. She draws upon childhood recollections of “middlemen encounters” to enrich her subject. In a previous book, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (2003), Tangires recounts the impact of life in public markets in the nineteenth century on civic culture in America. In Movable Markets readers will find that same care and attention given to the public market's transformation in the twentieth century. Tangires is also scrupulous in documenting how every aspect of both old and new marketplaces was shaped by the visible hand of government officials, through both direct regulatory oversight and indirect aid from local and federal governments.

A central theme of Movable Markets is the changing political status of not only the public marketplace but also shopkeepers, street vendors, public carriers for bulk goods, wholesale merchants, and government regulators, the “market middlemen” who play an increasingly important role in markets. The first chapter provides an overview of the nineteenth-century shift from direct selling between farmer and consumer toward the rise in wholesaling. The second chapter describes the rise of urban produce districts as mixed-use and “makeshift” retail environments and sets the stage for debates at the turn of the twentieth century, chronicled in chapter 3, about the inefficiencies of traditional neighborhood marketplaces. Here, Tangires makes good use of city archives and the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE) reports to show how economists conceptualized “the market problem” as a “lack of modern wholesale facilities, unnecessary waste, spoilage, and a multiplicity of middlemen who handled perishables from farm to table” (pp. 67–68). Many advocated for a centralized “terminal market” that, in effect, privileged the wholesale function of markets, work done by professional middlemen, over the everyday retailing needs of urban consumers.

Tangires's careful attention to physical market spaces brings them to life for readers interested in architectural history or urban planning. The protagonists of Movable Markets are market places as much as or more than people: Fulton Fish Market in New York City, Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia, and Faneuil Hall in Boston, to name a few. But Tangires also foregrounds space because it is central to her argument that “market infrastructures” played an important role in determining new marketing trends and political debates. A market's topography, structural design, and layout, its embeddedness in city infrastructures, shaped local debates about its redesign or relocation. This is why market infrastructures were a central concern for both market middlemen and regulators. New technologies in cold storage or new logistical needs for transporting food, first by railroad and later with trucking, had to be built into the design of new “modern” markets.

Building design would also contribute to a market's subsequent obsolescence. Advocates for moving wholesaling markets to the periphery saw it as a necessary step to modernize market facilities, to remove the logistical chaos and public-health hazards associated with city food markets and accommodate new transportation systems and the growing scale of commerce. Movable Markets shows how arguments over whether to keep open or to close a beloved local public market was about more than just nostalgic attachment. They were high-stakes political battles over whether “to keep food exchange a visible, public, and urban activity” or to cede the control and management of these exchanges to the growing numbers of market middlemen and state and federal regulators (p. 7). Changing control over infrastructure often determined the winners and losers of such debates.

Later chapters situate “the history of food wholesaling in the context of federalism,” explaining how New Deal programs and USDA policymakers came to promote state-sponsored regional wholesale markets over city-run alternatives (p. 142). A key transformation in this story is the rise of trucking. It was the postwar exit of supermarket giants like Piggly Wiggly and A&P from both public markets and railway terminal markets, as they constructed their own supply chain market infrastructures for trucking, that helped lead to the decline of city-run markets. Tangires shows how the USDA BAE played a central role in redefining “food marketing as a function of the state” instead of the city (p. 206). While the book tells a largely American-centric story, its conclusion teases readers with tantalizing examples of how these same American policymakers took their advocacy of the industrial park model on the road, in international organizations like the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and UNESCO, and how they influenced market reforms like the Paris Rungis initiative mentioned above.

Movable Markets leaves readers with a thought-provoking paradox that encapsulates many of the ironies and political challenges of modern foodways today. The movement of markets outside the city means that “food wholesaling in the United States [and abroad] caters to the city but is no longer of the city.” Instead, most food marketing now happens out of sight in an industrial park periphery, and “as a result, consumers know little about the journey of food from its source to the restaurant or store, or about the people who handle it along the way” (p. 221).