The Price of Deregulation
This chapter aims to write food access in an unregulated environment back into our understanding of mid-nineteenth-century urban living standards. Fieldwork and social geography were the approaches pursued by public health experts. The method here is to exploit new resources with digital mapping. The central question is how did food access shape living standards in a metropolis experiencing rapid growth, rising inequalities, and intensifying segregation? Further, how did unequal access to provisions map onto the more familiar inequalities of housing, sanitation, and disease conditions? The subject is complex, and at each intersection, from issues of quantity to distribution and quality, the historical record is patchy. But posing a new set of questions and proposing new answers is a step in the right direction.