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More than a century before Zohran Mamdani declared he wanted a New York City network of grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low,” socialists in Spain were furious about a network of grocery stores that kept prices low. An archipelago of tienda-asilos (shelter or asylum shops) had opened across the country in 1886, offering low-cost food for the burgeoning population of urban poor people. For the store’s proponents, tienda-asilos offered a way for working people to buy a square meal without the indignities of charity.
The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party begged to differ. First, they argued, the tienda-asilos were more tienda than asilo. Even though the stores themselves were nonprofit enterprises, the merchants along the supply chain providing food to the kitchen were in it for the money, and there were rumors of collusion and profiteering. (Then as now, food philanthropy was a lucrative business.) Second, there was little dignity to be had. The stores were sometimes tucked away far from town, where none need be seen queuing for a discount and the bourgeoisie needn’t be troubled by the sight of urban poverty. Reports of rancid food within the stores were rife.
Both the left and right distrust the food system, but their solutions couldn’t be more different.
The Spanish socialists didn’t want philanthropy and food banks; they wanted a way to eat that built class solidarity with dignity. But good examples were rare. At the turn of the century, the problem of how to tackle urban hunger vexed socialist and anarchist organizers across Europe and North America. Back then, spikes in food prices were often followed by the only response available: rebellion. In 1898 in Milan, dozens were killed in bread riots brought on by soaring wheat prices After poor weather and an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, European food prices spiked again in 1911. Women led protests in Austria and France. This time, some municipalities were ready to help, supporting negotiations for lower prices.
While the working class was in revolt, the middle class was revolted by something entirely different in the food system: impurity. In the United States, a wave of food adulteration and contamination scandals, paired with Upton Sinclair’s revelations of filth in slaughterhouses and workforce exploitation in his 1905 novel, The Jungle, led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. The Jungle’s last lines are a hymn to the possibility of municipal socialism, but the politics it had brought forth, Sinclair later lamented, were merely a moderate set of hygiene requirements to prevent widespread diarrhea. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he said.
Sinclair was frustrated by the differing views over whether food should be governed as an object of charity, a commodity, or a public good. Today, those same questions have resurfaced, energizing movements at opposite sides of the political spectrum. On one end is Mamdani’s revival of the idea of a municipal grocery store, part of a long lineage of socialist efforts to build dignity through public food. At the other is Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA coalition. Like its counterparts on the left, it too distrusts the food system, condemning additives, pesticides, and profiteering. But the links it draws between food and racial hygiene and its invocation of a natural purity that will strengthen the nation has its roots in a rather different source: 1930s Germany. Where MAHA casts dignity as an individual project of vigilance, self-care, and protection from foreign bodies, Mamdani connects it with a longer tradition of collective provision.
Indeed, if he wins his bid for New York City mayor, his public grocery proposal will have a predecessor over a century old. George R. Lunn was a Presbyterian minister and member of the Socialist Party of America. In his mayoral campaign, he sought to meet Schenectady’s crisis of social reproduction—in which family income was devoured by rent and an increasingly foreign-born workforce was at the mercy of unscrupulous bosses and traders—by providing affordable food. While campaigning, Lunn was careful to present himself as a reasonable man, a pastor and a veteran, convincingly enough to win him the election. But once in office, he was never able to surmount, as he put it, the “bitter opposition of the old parties,” both Republican and Democratic. Shortly after his first term as mayor began in 1912, he opened a public grocery store in the basement of City Hall and launched a municipal attempt to sell ice at cost. Neither plan lasted. Middle-class voters abandoned him, and local retailers sued.
Although Lunn himself was never again able to resuscitate it, the idea of a public grocery store refused to die, especially when citizens witnessed what the state might achieve in times of emergency. World War I inaugurated National Kitchens in the UK; in the United States, the federal government mobilized state resources to manage food supplies countrywide. Together the projects signaled, for the first time, that not only municipal but state-level socialist policy might be possible for the dinner table.
During the war, New York City entertained ideas of a municipal food department, which would use public health prerogatives to divert food from waste streams and into the city-governed municipal markets. Until the private sector eroded them in the 1840s, these had been far more comprehensive, with the majority of grocery conducted in public markets with regulated food safety and commercial good conduct. Those plans never came to fruition, but the demand persisted among anarchists and socialists. In 1917 the Mothers’ Anti-High Price League, a group of working-class and largely immigrant women, led mass demonstrations in New York, demanding $1 million for city-run grocery stores and another $1 million for school lunches.
The municipalization of grocery offers an infrastructure, says Mamdani, for “what you need to live a dignified life in this city.”
The idea that the government should function not just as a regulator but as a purchaser and distributor in the food system was echoed in wartime food protests in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They took place outside the United States too, especially in countries that had suffered price hikes. In Germany, revolutionary councils temporarily took over food distribution in several cities from 1918-19. In Chile, La Asamblea Obrera de Alimentación Nacional (AOAN), a cross-class social movement formed in November 1918 just days after the Armistice in Europe, led twenty thousand people on a march for public food systems in Santiago.
Fifty-two years later, AOAN got what they wanted. Salvador Allende, a former public health minister, eked out a victory in the 1970 presidential election, winning 36 percent of the national vote. His party moved swiftly to implement a national network of Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios (Supply and Price Control Boards), and “people’s stores” sprouted up across the country. Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, as it came to be called, nationalized the import supply chain into one consolidated state-run firm, the Chilean National Distribution Company, as a way of building solidarity with bakers, butchers, dry goods sellers and other small-scale food providers. Without the middleman, the Company could buy at lower prices.
But Allende’s exercise in solidarity development didn’t go far enough down the supply chain. Farmers, upset that price controls put limits on their income, refused to bring their wheat to market. The media was immediately hostile, too. Lacking allies in rural areas, Allende’s vision foundered. Economic sabotage and a bosses’ strike led to a counter-hegemonic coalition of truck drivers, upper-middle-class consumers, and large-scale traders, all of whom protested against Allende. Their efforts provided the backbone for the 1973 coup d’etat led by Augusto Pinochet who, after seizing power, dismantled the public grocery in September of that year.
I recently re-read Joshua Frens-String’s stirring account of Chile’s experiment, Hungry for Revolution (2021), because Mamdani’s proposal for municipal grocery stores seemed to be stirring such deep and familiar emotions. Frens-String is hopeful. “Mamdani’s plan has the potential to guarantee access to essential foodstuffs at a time when consumers are still experiencing rapidly rising grocery prices,” he told me over email. At a large enough scale, he thought, the plan could successfully curb food price inflation “by offering a competitive check on private establishments.”
The scale’s the rub. At present, New York City has only six small markets, vestiges of La Guardia New Deal–era attempts to return to public markets, where the city leases stalls, and small retailers sell their wares. But large-scale models do exist. Bulgaria’s government has announced plans to create a network of 1,500 stores across the country—particularly in underserved areas—with the goal of providing affordable groceries (with a maximum 10 percent mark-up) and supporting small-scale rural food production. Mexico has 25,000 basic goods outlets, with plans for 30,000 tiendas bienestar, well-being stores, by 2030. But we needn’t look overseas for inspiration. The U.S. federal government already buys food and sells it directly—at cost—to consumers. The Defense Commissary Agency is often cited as the U.S. government’s prime retail outlet, an Uncle Sam’s Club with storefronts on over two hundred military bases worldwide and over $5 billion in annual revenue.
Government-run grocery stores that operate at cost can certainly save consumers money—“from 20 to 30 percent,” according to Errol Schweizer, former vice president of grocery at Whole Foods (pre-Amazon takeover). But Schweizer suggested to me over email that the idea would need to go still further, “to have a public supply chain, which can internalize the fixed costs of grocery retail—inflation, occupancy and taxes—while ensuring workers are unionized and dignified.” A public supply chain means that the city itself would buy food directly from producers, own or lease warehouses and retail space, and manage distribution. By cutting out private wholesalers, landlords, and shareholders, it can stabilize prices against inflation, avoid commercial rent hikes, and reinvest surpluses rather than extracting them as profit. Crucially, it also sets standards for union wages and dignified work, ensuring that affordable food doesn’t come at the expense of exploited labor. It’s a win for growers, workers, and eaters and, as a result, it’s a coalition-building machine.
On paper, the MAHA coalition also purports to embrace the spread of good food consumption. Many in the food policy community celebrated when Trump gave RFK Jr. carte blanche to “go wild” on corporate abuses in the food chain. CNN breathlessly reported that food brands were bracing for a “food fight.” Some nutritionists and public health advocates like Marion Nestle, otherwise critical of the administration and RFK Jr., were pleased that the language of sensible public health interventions had finally emerged from the Department of Health and Human Services. For a moment, it seemed like the administration’s aggressive posture toward food companies—one that had been conspicuously lacking in the Obama and Biden administrations’ more supine approach to Big Food—would mark one of those rare instances where the right was more willing to tackle corporate power than their Democratic counterparts. Compare MAHA’s lofty ambitions, for instance, to Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, a project that at best was a memorial for the “hope and change” in the food system that died on contact with the administration’s donors. But if hopes were misplaced in Obama, they are further misplaced in Trump. Despite its hymns to transparency, his Presidential Commission to Make America Healthy Again is troublingly vague. Its charter document offers a lengthy catalogue of America’s public health failings, on which most reasonable people could agree are real and in dire need of structural remedy—for instance, that “the United States had the highest age-standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021, nearly double the next-highest rate.” But the document goes on to describe its task as helping Americans manage their exposures to disease and danger by “informing the American people . . . using transparent and clear facts.” If a word in the MAHA Commission hints at regulation, I’ve not found it. Instead it takes a well-founded concern—the opaque and often-compromised connections between corporations and federal bodies charged with governing those corporations—and flips it into a simple call for consumer education: hardly the full-frontal assault the agency’s leaders had promised. Lately, even the meek transparency goal seems to have been tossed by the wayside. In his initial video message to the Department of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. promised to usher in an era of ‘radical transparency’ as a way of rebuilding trust with the American people. Within two months, the entire public records staff at the CDC, FDA and NIH had been fired. Now, consumers will be alone in taking responsibility for whether or not they fall victim to corporate malfeasance.
Under MAHA, Americans are encouraged to make themselves healthy again.
MAHA’s crisis presents an opportunity for Mamdani. His right-wing critics, featured in the New York Times and Fox, have suggested that his public markets proposal is a sign that he and his supporters are divorced from reality, a symptom, as Trump put it, of “communism.” Were a future Mamdani administration to open twenty unionized Costco-style stores with sustainable, locally produced food, the vituperative and voluble reaction would certainly be greater. Yet the scale of the attacks on Mamdani over this issue reflects the deep resonance his campaign holds with a New York public sick of food price inflation that has surpassed the national average for over a decade. And a public grocery system—visible, reliable, dignified—can prefigure something larger: collective infrastructures of care that meet immediate needs, exposing the bankruptcy of consumerist fixes. During crises of social reproduction, experiments like these can push the limits of what kinds of health, dignity, and democracy are possible.
The coalition for a public food system is closer to forming than it looks.
Those collective expectations, the horizons of political possibility, are the huge stakes at play in today’s debate over food. It’s a debate about public health versus national hygiene. Public grocery’s success and failure will be a measure not so much of logistics as of Mamdani’s ability to lead a bloc around the vision that it anchors. Grocery stores are not just a venue for food retail but an opportunity to recruit and rearticulate a series of political alliances that, increasingly, feel betrayed by MAHA. Moms Across America, an organization whose political wing has leaned in heavily to MAHA candidates, is already chafing at the administration’s capitulation to the pesticide industry and HHS’s timidity in addressing the harms wrought by environmental toxins. A public food system would be far readier to regulate, and eliminate, these kinds of poisons from the supply chain, and far more amenable to reasonable scientific debate around protecting children’s health from the private food industry. In other words, there’s a fraction of the bourgeoisie ready to be recruited to a working-class bloc, if the Mamdani campaign is canny enough to do it. In New York City, the coalition for a public food system is closer to forming than it looks. In September, Community Kitchen will open at the Lower Eastside Girls Club, joining the wave of efforts to make food a public good rather than a private commodity. The restaurant will offer tiered pricing, so that foodies looking to try award–winning cooking will pay $125 to break Mark Bittman’s bread with local residents who will pay $15 for the same privilege. This is what a historic bloc might look like in microcosm, led by the working class with elements of the bourgeoisie along for the ride. Labor is on board, too. Faye Guenther, president of United Food and Commercial Workers 3000, talked to Schwiezer and me about the importance of bringing in the already-existing public sector worker networks. Liz Accles, the executive director of Community Food Advocates, a New York City–based nonprofit that drives systemic food justice through policy and coalition building is optimistic. The City of New York’s government spends $500 million a year on food already. Public stores could leverage that purchasing power, Accles told me by email, as “a critically important element of a more comprehensive approach to address the lack of access to quality, affordable grocery access in New York City.” That comprehensive approach will need to build the coalition further still. New York’s socialist and anarchist movements, the original incubators of the idea of public grocery, are already circling the same demands. The Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s own base, has been pushing tenants’, labor, and climate campaigns that all point back to food as infrastructure. Black-led groups like the Brooklyn Movement Center are building food cooperatives in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, while immigrant women of Movement for Justice in El Barrio are fighting gentrification with a horizontal politics rooted in everyday survival. The Audre Lorde Project and The Okra Project, led by queer and trans people of color, remind us that food justice is inseparable from gender and racial justice. Anarchist networks like the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, alongside worker-led groups such as Workers Justice Project, have kept mutual aid kitchens alive through pandemic and austerity alike. Stitch these actors together with unions and public-restaurant pioneers, and what emerges is not just a campaign for cheaper groceries but a counter-hegemonic bloc—multiracial, feminist, immigrant, queer—ready to reclaim food as a public good. None should underestimate the task. Billionaires have written large checks to the opposition. The Manhattan Institute’s guns are trained on Mamdani and his efforts to push back against the affordability crisis. His political charm can only go so far, particularly after a victory. The immediate and well-funded efforts to undermine Chicago’s left-leaning mayor, Brandon Johnson, augur the campaign that will try to undermine a Mamdani victory from day one—just as a similar campaign brought down Allende.
But the pieces of a united front are there. Put them together—health advocates disillusioned with MAHA’s empty promises, restaurant folk experimenting with public kitchens, grocery workers demanding dignified jobs, and legions of ordinary citizens unable to access quality food—and you begin to see the outlines of a counter-hegemonic bloc. Public grocery is not a technocratic tweak but a rallying point, a chance to turn discontent into solidarity. Those Spanish socialists railing against philanthropy were right. They wanted low prices, social solidarity, and dignity. Mamdani’s vision, if writ large, can durably achieve all three. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
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