Food City: Four Centuries of Food-Making in New York
Joy Santlofer, W.W. Norton & Co., 459 pages, $28.95. The amount of sheer space food production once occupied in New York City will seem staggering to most of the city's present-day residents. Tiffany's now stands on what was called "pig town" because of the unmistakable odor the processing houses brought to the neighborhood. Shoppers at Chelsea Market and strollers on the High Line know how vast the Nabisco factory was and thus can imagine why workers needed roller skates to deliver messages. The food industries of New York created great fortunes: The Roosevelts and Havemeyers made their money in sugar. Uneeda Biscuits, Oreos, Thomas' English Muffins, Streit's matzo, Dentyne and Chiclets and Trident gum, Twizzlers and Barricini and Loft candies — they were all produced there. Joy Santlofer's "Food City" has plenty of sidebars to feed the nostalgia. But the market researcher turned food historian makes the industry's working conditions the book's main theme. Bread bakers worked in 100-degree heat in airless, vermin-filled cellars, breathing in poisonous gases and pulverized flour that could cause ailments like "baker's itch." Windows in the drying rooms of the Havemeyer sugar factory were kept closed, yielding such high temperatures that workers experienced hallucinations. Santlofer (who died unexpectedly when the book was nearly finished) also writes of opposition to organized labor and wage strikes. The book ends with the hopeful return of artisanal producers to (of course) Brooklyn.
NEW YORK TIMES
