Andrew Deener’s fascinating book represents an important contribution to the sparsely populated field of social studies of food infrastructure. In recent years, the social sciences have become deeply interested in infrastructures and have dutifully produced a flurry of studies of water, electric, rail, internet, and other systems. Amidst the growing body of work that has emerged from the “infrastructural turn,” discussions of food infrastructures have been largely absent. This may be in part, as Deener suggests, because food infrastructures were developed not through centrally planned and subsidized works (as in water or electricity), but rather as market systems, in which profit logic and the quest for efficiency drew together a heterogeneous array of private actors in contingent and piecemeal fashion. Yet food infrastructures, no less than rail or energy, construct spatial and social relations and inequalities. The Problem with Feeding Cities represents an ambitious attempt to unpack the black box...

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