Movable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City. By Helen Tangires,. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xiii + 292 pp. Photographs, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-2747-8 .

Movable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City. By Helen Tangires. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xiii + 292 pp. Photographs, illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $59.95. ISBN: 978-1-4214-2747-8.

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....