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Jonathan Rees.  The Fulton Fish Market: A History. Columbia University Press, 2022.

I really wanted to read this book and was appy to do a blurb for it.

Rees’s history of Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market is an elegy for a place that reached peak vibrancy in the 1920s, only to decline steadily as a result of overfishing, developers, the Mafia, unions, politics, refrigeration, real estate prices, and, eventually, more developers.  Rees’s thoughtful analysis of these themes has much to tell us about the clash between the natural and built worlds in American cities over the last couple of centuries.

Rees is a history professor at Colorado State-Pueblo, a food historian.  I’ve long wanted to understand the changes I’ve witnessed at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and the reasons for moving the fish market to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, a mile from the nearest subway station.

I remember my first visit—at 4:00 am on a cold winter’s day—to the fish market in the mid-1990s.  It was lit up like a stadium, crowded with people, tables covered with fish, and hand-trucks for moving them.  I thought it looked like a move set on which the director has just shouted, “Action.”  We had to move quickly to avoid being hit.

My guide was the chef-owner of a Chelsea fish restaurant who pulled thousands of dollars in cash out of his pockett o pay for the fish he was selecting carefully for the next few days.  His purchases went to a van that would take them to his restaurant within the next hour or so.

We went for coffee at a nearby café and were out of there by 6:00 a.m.

I picked four excerpts from Rees’ book that help explain the history of this place:

(1) Two developments very close to the Fulton Fish Market spurred the transformation of the entire neighborhood into something new by the end of the twentieth century and beyond: the founding of the South Street Seaport Museum in 1967 and the development of the neighborhood by the Rouse Corporation, a Baltimore firm best known for its successful revitalization of the Faneuil Hall area in Boston… More development increased rents. Businesses which made more money than dealing in wholesale fish then bought up properties that the dealers had moved into earlier in the century, thereby changing the character of the neighborhood. The city and the state never deemed the actual fish market worthy of protection. As a result, every new project that made the neighborhood more desirable made it harder for the fish market to stay a fish market.

(2) From a longterm perspective, the geographical advantage of the Fulton Fish Market disappeared when fish stopped arriving there by water….When they arrived in New York by train or truck it no longer mattered where in New York City the fish market happened to be. In fact, with the arrival of modern refrigeration and freezing, you could have moved the largest fish market in America to Connecticut, or South Carolina for that matter….

(3) The original Fulton Fish Market was obviously a market in the sense that it was a place to buy and sell fish, but the longterm historical significance of the place derives more from the other sense of the word “market,” namely the abstract idea that there is a set of dedicated buyers for the good that gets sold there. The wholesalers who ran the Fulton Fish Market expanded the scope of the abstract market in order to keep their physical market going…Nobody really cared about the public good as long as they were all still making money…the actions of the wholesalers who operated there spurred the general indifference of the wholesale fish industry to the problem of overfishing, despite the obvious cost of this behavior to the overall amount of fish in the sea.

(4) In ancient Greece, the marketplace was the center of daily life. The body politic congregated there to interact, make collective decisions and conduct commerce. Fulton Market bore some resemblance to this situation during its early history, but its operations became less public as it evolved into a wholesale market….Today, without a subway stop anywhere near it, average New Yorkers would have difficulty getting to any of the city’s wholesale markets in the South Bronx. Moreover, because of improvements in refrigeration and transportation, wholesale markets aren’t even necessary for restaurants or groceries to operate in the city anymore… These days, it is very easy to forget that Manhattan is an island.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Chloe Sorvino.  Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat.  Atria Books, 2022.  

This is the first analysis I’ve seen of the meat industry from a business perspective.  Corvino is a business reporter from Forbes and did an amazing research job to do this book, including visiting CAFOs, slaughterhouses (she doesn’t say how she talked her way into it), chicken houses, and alternative meat places.  She also talked to a vast number of experts on all sides of the meat issue.  Full disclosure: she interviewed me and quoted me in the book in a couple of places.

I was happy to do a blurb for it.

Raw Deal is Chloe Sorvino’s deeply reported, first-hand account of how business imperatives drive the meat industry to mistreat workers, pollute the environment, fix prices, bribe, and manipulate the political process, all in the name of shareholder profits.  She argues convincingly for holding this industry accountable and requiring it and other corporations to engage in social as well as fiduciary responsibility.   Raw Deal is a must read for anyone who cares about where our food comes from.

On meat substitutes

I have yet to meet anyone in this industry who says they do not care about climate change.  In fact, many say they are personally driven by their product’s sustainability and environmental potential.  But it’s still all to a certain point.  There’s a reason Impossible Foods is preparing for a potentially $10 billion public listing, and that neither Impossible nor Beyond Meat is registered as public benefit corporations a move that would legally inhibit the companies from putting profit over their environmental mission.  Half of Impossible’s investors come from venture capital firms and the roster even includes a hedge fund, Viking Global Investors. Backers are no doubt ready for an exit, and they want to get Impossible the best deal.  A sustainability halo helps the cause (pp. 169-170).

On support for small local meat producers

Local infrastructure for livestock producers to cook and package products is a key missing link in making local food systems profitable and viable.  Creating lasting impacts wouldn’t cost much.  “We have the information and we have the evidence.  FaWhat we don’t have are the facilities and shared space where multiple people can leverage that at their business’s scale,” Mickie told me.  “It’s just crazy to me to be in a space where we’re trying to meet so many intersecting issues of inequity, and have to prove it one hundred percent, and then in another realm, people are playing with stem cells and getting two hundred million dollars.  We literally feed people and want to do it better )p. 257).

Chloe Sorvino has also published:

• An adapted essay in the Los Angeles Times on universal food access
• An excerpt in Fast Company about whether good meat exists

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

From Oxford University Press:

I was happy to be asked to contribute to this book: 

My thanks to Eric Crosbie, who did the heavy lifting on the chapter and also co-authored two other chapters (on trade and investment and on teaching commercial determinants of health.

This book brings together multiple authors and perspectives on how corporations selling unhealthful commodities—tobacco, alcohol, and junk food, for example—act to protect sales and marketing, regardless of effects on individual and collective health.

Chapters cover the policies and politics, the ways commercial interessts have taken over culture, how companies influence science, research, and marketing, examples of such influence, analyses of the legal issues, and recommendations for countering corporate actions.

The chapters are so informative and so well referenced that it’s hard to select specific examples.  But here’s one from George Annas’ chapter on “Corporations as Irresponsible Artificial People.”

The public health goal is to make the social responsibility of corporations a reality rather than just a feel-good marketing slogan.  This will require transforming the corporation from an instrument designed and run to make money while indifferent to polluting the planet and destroying the health of humans to an entity whose money-making must be consistent with preserving the health of the planet and its inhabitants.  Central to this objecti8ve is to replace the currfent post-2008 system in which profits are kept by the owners of capital, and losses are socialized by being paid for by governments, most notably for corporations that are “too big to fail.”  Any sustainable system requires that both gains and losses are shared by corporations and governments.  Sharing gains and lossers will require a restructuring of corporate tax, including a minimum tax for all corporations, but domestic and multinational.

Amen.  Everyone needs to understand that food corporations are not social service or public health agencies.  They are businesses stuck with responding to the shareholder value movement, which forces them to make profits their first and only priority.

This system needs to change.  This book provides the evidence.

Note: I discussed many of these same issues in Unsavorty Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.  

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

I’ve been doing this blog for years, but have very little idea of whether anyone looks at it or whether it is at all useful.  But every now and then, I hear that it just might be.  Here is an example with a happy ending.

Harold McGee just sent me a copy of the new paperback edition of his book, Nose Dive, with a note saying “Thanks for the index.”

The book, as I explained in my first post about it in 2020, is a marvelous encyclopedia of everything known about the sense of smell and the smells of everything from from foods, of course, but also everything else that smells from soil to armpits to flowers.  I thought the book was amazing—right up there with his classic On Foods and Cooking.  Alas, I had one serious complaint about it.

But uh oh.  How I wish it had a better index. 

For a book like this, the index needs to be meticulously complete—list every bold face term every time it appears—so readers can find what we are looking for.  This one is surprisingly unhelpful.

I found this out because I forgot to write down the page number for the fatty acid excerpt shown above.  I searched the index for most of the key words that appear in the clip: fatty acids, short and branched; butyric; methylbutyric; hexanoic; cheesy; intersteller space. No luck.  I had to check through all of the fatty acid listings and finally found it under “fatty acids, and molecules in asteroids, 19.”   Oh.  Asteroids.  Silly me.

I also forgot to note the page for the CAFO quote.  CAFO is not indexed at all, even though it appears in bold on the previous page, and neither does its definition, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.

McGee refers frequently to “Hero Carbon,” the atom basic to odiferous molecules.  I couldn’t remember where he first used “Hero” and tried to look it up.  Not a chance.

This book deserves better, alas.

Penguin Press:  this needs a fix, big time.

I talked to McGee about the index problem.  Penguin had given him a limit on index entries.

He wrote me recently that when Penguin asked him to file any corrections for the paperback edition,

I sent them your review and told them I’d be willing to redo the index myself, stem to stern. After several weeks they agreed. It was exhausting. But the paperback came out last week, so now there’s a decent index available. Maybe I can put it online for hardover owners.  So: thanks again for taking the trouble to make the case!

Happy ending indeed.

Have anything like this you want complained about?  I’ll be glad to help.  Sometimes complaints get results.

And thanks Harold, for this truly remarkable book—and for making me think doing this blog is worthwhile.

Margo Anne Kelley.  Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love & Homegrown Food.  Godine, 2022.  

I was asked to do a blurb for this book and readily agreed.

Foodtopia gives us a generous overview of Americans’ historic and contemporary involvement in utopian communities through the lens of their dietary beliefs and practices.  From Thoreau’s Walden to Penniman’s Soul Fire Farm, the search for agrarian values and food justice should inspire us to support—and join—these movements.

If you don’t know the history of  back-to-the-land movements, this is a great place to begin.

Some quick excerpts:

• Thoreau could dwell safely and comfortably on the outskirts of town not because his mom fed him or washed his clothes but because he was white, male, single, able-bodied, a local son, a keen observer, a practiced outdoorsman, a skilled forager and gardener, a capable craftsman, and friend of the landowner.  Without any one of those attributes, he’d have had a tougher go of it….He could move back to town whenever he wanted. 
• In turning away from mainstream food, many back-to-the-landers became vegetarian.  Some wanted to eat lower on the food chain for environmental, financial, ethical, or political reasons; others simply liked thumbing their nose at the meat-eating bourgeoisie.
• …each generation of back-to-the-land utopians has been personally connected to members of an earlier one, has learned from, admired, and often loved them….by enacting their beliefs, b dreaming into being a more capacious world, the changed the existing one for all of us.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Joeva Sean Rock.  We Are Not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana.  Michigan State University Press, 2022.  188 pages

I enjoyed getting to know Joeva Rock when she had a fellowship in my NYU department, and was honored to be asked to blurb her book:

We Are Not Starving is an utterly compelling account of how the failure of international donors to understand and respect the recipients of development aid contributes to the failure of their projects.  Through the industry’s attempts to introduce GMO crops in Ghana, anthropologist Joeva Rock draws lessons essential for anyone who wants international development to work.  If you want to understand the real, on-the-ground politics of GMOs, start here.

A couple of excerpts from the manuscript:

• Ghanaian officials recognized the limitations posed by IPRs [Intellectual Property Rights] as an important way to collect financial benefits from GMO.  Thus, rather than describe GMOs as a humanitarian technology, as donors sought to do, Ghanaian officials and scientists went out of their way to stress that, when coupled with IPRs, GM seeds were “the secret” to obtaining profit, revenue that was sorely needed in the post-structural adjustment era of gutted state infrastructure.
• Ghanaians continually critiqued global discourses and development industry standards wherein philanthropists and professionals in the Global North set boundaries for conversations about hunger, collapse Africa into a homogenized, starving entity, and the prescribe solutions based on these racialized myths.  These critiques are reflective of recipient fatigue and are often held in tension with discourse emanating from the same donors that sponsor the work of GMO advocates, who rely on images and texts that depict Africa as languishing and starving.

Douglas Frantz & Catherine Collins.  Salmon Wars: The Dark Underbelly of America’s Favorite Fish.  Henry Holt, 2022.  (355 pages)

I was asked to do a blurb for this one.  Here’s what I said:

Salmon Wars is a deep dive into the damage caused by current fish-farming methods to ocean environments, wild fish and their habitats, and to the farmed fish themselves.  It is also a dismal account of the failure of governments to stop such practices.  Salmon farming needs reform.  Until it does, read this book, and you will never eat farmed salmon again.

As for what to do about the hazards of salmon farming—lice, pollution, reduction of wild salmon, escape from pens, requirement for feeder fish and the depletion of those stocks, the authors have three suggestions:

(1) Know the risks and rewards of eating farmed salmon and insist on more transparency.

(2) Take responsibility for insisting on better ways of raising farmed salmon.

And (3)

The third step is for governments to stop putting a thumb on the scale when weighing economic interests versus the public wellbeing.  Governments should take responsibility for protecting the environment and public health.  They should adopt strict curbs on the use of chemicals by salmon farmers.  They should require notification of all relevant authorities of every escape or suspected escape, and those reports should be made public.  Food labels should be thorough, accurate, and reflect how the salmon was raised…There must be similar global efforts to protect the public health and the welfare of salmon.

This is a hard-hitting book and, as you might expect, it’s gotten some pushback.

Saving Seafood, a group that “conducts media and public relations outreach on behalf of the seafood industry,” says “New ‘Salmon Wars’ Book Is Full of Fictions. Here Are the Facts.”  Here are a couple of examples:

FICTION: Farmed salmon are crammed into cages.

FACT: Salmon occupy less than 4 percent of a typical marine cage. Farmers intentionally keep stocking densities low so fish have room to swim, grow, and mimic natural schooling patterns.

Farmers take great care to ensure the well-being of their salmon. Fish are vaccinated against several diseases, and pristine marine cage conditions are ensured with proper siting, regular fallowing (leaving sites unused), underwater cameras, and diver inspections.

FICTION: Farmed salmon are doused with pesticides and antibiotics.

FACT: Antibiotic use on salmon farms is far lower than that of any other agricultural animal producing industry in the world. In the rare instances when treatment is necessary, it is prescribed and overseen by licensed veterinarians under the oversight of government regulators.

In 2012 I visited a salmon farm above the Arctic Circle in Norway’s and wrote a post about it.

That one looked pretty good.  Now?  Others?  Who knows?

My recommendation: Visit one if you can.  Short of that, read this book.  Than decide what you think are the facts.

R.C. Harris.  Party Food: A Partisan History of Food & Farming in America.  Common Ground, 2021 (147 pages plus an index).

The author, a politics professor at Washington & Lee University, sent me a copy of her book, which I have now read.

I love the cover.

This is a book about the differing views of Farm Bill provisions among Democrats and Republicans.

Harris points out, correctly, that recent books about food policy in the United States, mine among them, say practically nothing about the role of the two political parties in deciding food issues.  Here, she corrects this omission.

She does so using a sports analogy–red and blue teams with one goal: to win.  A brief excerpt:

Setting the Stage: Farmers on Welfare in a Capitalist Society

The main problem in our story is that farm policy is really about giving farmers federal dollars to stay in business—and this idea tends to divide the red team from the blue team.  The history of modern farm policy in the United States is essentially the history of social welfare policy—a policy designed to prop up the incomes of farm families…As a nation of independent, hardworking, self-sufficient citizens and immigrants, America has always been more likely to embrace capitalism and less likely to expect government support than nations with a history of kinds, vassals, and peasants.  This means America is much more centrist and market-oriented in its economic policy, making welfare the exception rather than the rule. (p.53)

I get what she’s saying and her points are worth considering, but I wish she had used a word other than “farmers.”  The ones who get corporate welfare in America are not your small subsistence farmers or even those of medium size.

A more precise term here would be Big Agriculture.

The Farm Bill is welfare for the rich.  That’s why the red team is for it.

But her contention that the food movement needs to pay more attention to party politics demands attention.

Voting really matters to our players on the field.  In fact, we learned that partisan farm policy is really field policy—what will keep the team on the field.  And, interestingly enough, this has a lot to dow with what is in the fields and on the tables (and on the menus, and in the regrigerator, and for sale at the store or local farmers market) where the players are elected.  In other words, political teams want to be re-elected so they can keep making political plays.  (p. 131)

As I keep saying, if you want the food movement to have power, run for office.

Maybe it’s time for a third team?