Ashley Rose Young, "Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans" (Oxford UP, 2025)

About this episode

Dr. Ashley Rose Young discusses the role of food in shaping the culture and economy of New Orleans.

For much of the Crescent City's history, days began with the cries of roaming street vendors and the percussive thwack of butchers' meat cleavers echoing out from the municipal markets. Generations of New Orleanians—Black and white, enslaved and free, men and women, wealthy and working class—gathered in public to feed the city.In Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in New Orleans (Oxford UP, 2025), historian Dr. Ashley Rose Young illuminates the central role of food in shaping the vibrant culture of New Orleans. While the city's dynamic culinary scene fostered bonds between some communities, under the surface, groups viciously vied for control over who bought and sold food and where they could do it. Dr. Young traces the intricate systems of food vendors and their customers, and how those relationships were affected by race, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. She shows how vendors and customers alike exercised considerable influence over the city's food economy and the laws that regulated it by negotiating prices, shaping taste preferences, liaising with government officials, and even openly defying ordinances they felt were unfair. The power each group…

People in this episode

Guest: Ashley Rose Young

Topics covered

• food culture
• New Orleans history
• public markets
• race and food
• socioeconomic status
• culinary scene

Keywords

• food
• New Orleans
• history
• vendors
• culture
• economy
• race
• gender
• ethnicity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Oxford UP

Places: New Orleans, Crescent City, New Orleanians

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