Consuming classes: Changing food consumption patterns in New York City, 1790--1860

During the early nineteenth century, New Yorkers experienced a food revolution, brought about by well-documented improvements in industry, transportation, technology, and communications, as well as the growth of New York City in terms of size and population. By the 1830s New Yorkers of varied social backgrounds had access to foods that had been out of reach for previous generations. New public dining options, including restaurants, ice creameries, and oyster cellars, emerged to cater to a variety of patrons. The dining room became an increasingly requisite component of the proper middle-class home. Antebellum diet reformers and a host of other cultural arbiters participated in a shrill public discourse on proper food choices and food-related behaviors.; As eating became a public act, and one increasingly tied to commerce, one's food choices and manner of eating became an ever-more important marker of status and gentility. Rather than serving as a democratizing force, increased access to new food-related consumer items contributed to increasing social stratification. The expansion of access to items formerly identified as genteel led to a degentrification of those items. Performance and ritual, rather than just goods, now served as the central markers of gentility. As the food revolution confronted New Yorkers concerned about class status, how they ate became much more important than what they ate.; “Consuming Classes: Changing Food Consumption Patterns in New York City, 1790–1860,” traces these developments and examines the social and cultural impact of new patterns of consumption on an urban population in the post Revolutionary and antebellum periods. In so doing, it addresses and clarifies some of the large questions historians have asked of the antebellum period. These questions focus on: the impact of the consumer revolution; class formation and identity; the simultaneous rise of political democratization and social stratification and inequality; nineteenth-century urban development; the shifting line between public and private spheres in the antebellum city; and the workings of gender in the determination of social class. “Consuming Classes” also provides the first concerted scholarly study of new food options and changing eating patterns in antebellum New York City.