ABSTRACT
New York City presents an enormous and ever-changing market for a vast diversity of food products. In New York you can indulge your senses in sticky Jordanian pastries made with pistachios imported from Afghanistan, Amazonian açaí whipped into shakes, and a steaming bowl of Vietnamese pho with a fresh sprig of Thai basil floating atop. New York City prides itself on the ability to offer authentic tastes from distant cornets of the world. This joy of urban life depends on a global order of trade. Traditional food products increasingly come from nontraditional places. 1 Chinese okra is grown in Honduras, rambutan in Guatemala, and longan in Mexico. New York, like most other cities, contributes to a supposedly efficient, industrial, and corporately controlled food system. Such agribusiness developed in part to feed burgeoning urban populations. Yet within the same cities that support industrial, agriculture, other systems are defined and redefined every day. The many spaces of New York City offer opportunities for alternatives to the seemingly dominant political economic reality of corporate globalization. Multilingual, transnational peoples find ways to use spaces not appropriated by corporate interests to create their own international systems of capital exchange.
